AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 1/1/20

What Worked


1. Darby Allin vs. Cody Rhodes

ER: First match on our 2020 MOTY List, and for all I know the first actual match of 2020. You want to start off your year with fireworks, you need to put a powder keg like Darby out in front. This also felt like a big Cody performance, and had a long moment towards the end when he hit a big cutter on Darby, had Darby down, and took the time to toss his loose weight belt and posture for the crowd. I could see something like this unnecessarily halting a match's momentum, but it worked for me here and added to Cody's confident performance. Darby crashed all over the place, crumpling weird on Cody's throws (like that big reverse suplex), and fighting back in ultra competitive ways. Darby hits this insanely great tope right into Cody's tender shoulder. I mean he really crashed hard sideways right in the exact spot that Cody had been rubbing. Darby would come back to that shoulder and Cody was good at showing the effects. I thought Cody came off like a real big deal here, and he really fearlessly took some of Darby's craziest ideas in stride. The lunacy of one man to do the coffin drop to the apron combined with the lunacy of the other man to lie waiting to have his ribs crushed, is something special. The Arn play was some classic wrestling back scratching, just a great use of a legend. I loved Arn just showing Cody the play book, the man who did all the tape watching. It's hard not to do that and come off a little corny, but the execution of this was flawless.

PAS: Darby is a great guy to start the year with, he comes off like such a star on TV, in a way that indie acts often don't. We get one big Darby bump to the floor, and a couple of teased huge bumps, when Cody shoves him off the ropes and he lands on the stage, and when the Coffin Drop on the ring apron doesn't crash and burn and he actually hits it. The arm work was all pretty cool, his crazy cannonball tope to the shoulder was great looking, and I loved Darby's scramble to grab a Fujiwara. Good Cody performance too, his selling was good, and the Ultimo Guerrero reverse suplex is a big piece of offense. I liked the finish too, with Arn not interfering, but calling in the play from the sidelines. I don't think this will stay at number #1 too long, but it is a nice opener for the year.


-Damn Sammy Guevara is really great. He's the first guy to figure out how to do something effective during a commercial break when all you have to work with is a 1/8 screen picture window. That thing can be a real killer of matches, watching a small part of your screen while muting a commercial for metastatic breast cancer medication that is taking up 3/4 of your screen. Sammy cuts a promo on cue cards and finally cracks the code on how to advance your character during a commercial. This guy is good.

-Dustin's new ring gear alone would have gotten this to the top part of the page, but the Sammy match was great. Outside of the bummer of a commercial break (down below), this was a great use of both characters and another great Dustin performance. This guy has been on a tear that I think we've all been dreading running out for 10 years now. When he really came back to status as a top 10 worker in 2009, it felt like something destined to being a memorable 6 month run. And he turned that comeback into being the best TV worker of the past decade. Guevara's twerp heel act is really entertaining to me, a great guy to have Dustin chop and slap around the ring. Dustin really lays a great beating to him, breaks out a wonderful cannonball to the floor, breaks out two different snap powerslams including one on the floor, is crazy enough to be a ring veteran doing a Canadian Destroyer on the RING APRON in the same week where veterans are complaining about how the kids are killing the business, and he continues to move as quickly against these juniors he works. Sammy is a great opportunist punk, and I like him smarmily using his flying offense and balancing it with tight strikes. His mounted punches were hitting Dustin hard enough that it felt like he was making damn sure nobody would be the one to notice him whiffing on punches vs. Dustin. The finish was screwy but I liked it. Jack Swagger sneaking up on Dustin from behind only to knee him in the balls feels like Swagger is properly incorporating Proud Boy street offense into his in ring repertoire. I can't envision a scenario where Dustin on my TV will end up down below.

-I'm beyond tired of Pentagon's act at this point and always do a forward skip once he starts his cero miedo hand signals routine. It always saves me time. And I really didn't like that Nick Jackson/Fenix Riverdance kick exchange mirror sequence. But the match picked up nicely after that with nice Bucks double teams, big twisting moonsault to the floor from Pac that crumpled Omega, a dumb fun suplex exchange between Pac and Omega that ended with a fantastic sitout powerbomb from Omega, and that pinfall ended with Pentagon making a positive contribution and kicking Omega in the mouth. This had plenty of moments including a wild spinning kick off the top by Fenix that ends with Fenix eating Omega's knee. This was fun, capped to a reasonable length.


What Didn't Work


-ER: That opening video really felt like a "See? Nothing wrong here. Not worried. We're just four friends agreeing on everything and saying 'Elite' a lot."

-I am not excited to hear Taz calling matches, but maybe he's gotten better since his last TNA run. Cruel to have Schiavone the one absent. JR can't take a break?

-Is Scorpio Sky trying to talk like The Rock, or has his promo pentameter just leaked into general backstage promo styles?

-I'm just not into Nyla Rose's brand of monster. The set up is long and requires everyone to go along with everything. I'm tired of spots where people have to pretend to be hung up on the ropes while waiting to get hit, and while AEW typically has people doing that 1-3 times per episode, I think Rose is the biggest offender. And here she really hung Shida out to dry while taking forever to get to the top. The knee that ended it looked good, but the journey was long and arduous. Nyla has a "better version of Tamina" vibe, but that's a low jumping off point. Riho had good energy that added to things, and I liked Baker's comeback spots. There's a chance Baker is someone who thrives in multimans but gets exposed in singles matches, and that's at least promising.

-Matches like Moxley vs. Trent are part of what makes some stretches of Dynamite a real drag. Moxley is in a program with the champ, he doesn't need to be having 2.9 count matches with Trent, there don't need to be Malenko/Guerrero roll ups, he doesn't need to give Trent 70% of the match to make sure Trent comes out of this like a star. He doesn't need to "make" Trent. This started fine, with Moxley kind of shoving Trent around the ring with big full arm chops, but they pretty quickly went to "This is an equal contest between two guys who both have what it takes" and AEW needs to just stop that. This should have been 5-6 minutes and a not really in doubt victory for Moxley. He doesn't need to give Trent 5 different close nearfalls.

-The commercial cut in Dustin/Sammy was cruel unfortunate brutality. We're already in the tiny 1/8 portion of the screen, Sammy has his head draped on the apron wedged into the ringpost, Dustin is approaching and swinging a chair at Sammy's head...and then we cut to a Little Caesars and Thor, and when the match comes back Sammy is holding Dustin in a chinlock. What!? How did he escape the chair predicament? How did Sammy untie himself from the train tracks in time? Let alone get to the position of hitting an Asai moonsault? That thin crust pizza ad wasn't THAT long. The most unfortunate ad break.


2019 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 11/6/19

What Worked:

-I love how Pac handled Orange Cassidy getting into the ring. Cassidy got into the ring while Pac was turned the other way, the crowd went wild, and Pac acted like he was the one getting the crowd hyped. That's a smart way for a heel to be paying attention to the crowd.

-"Undesirable to Un-goddamn-deniable" is a great line from Cody, good place to peak a promo

-Feels like the Jericho video is going to be contentious, but I liked it. At first I thought it was filled with nothing but bad acting and bad reads, but I got the tone the longer it went and I liked the presentation of a heel champ writing off his challenger. The stuff that was supposed to be funny (dumb eyed Jack Swagger making his "did I accidentally put two mouth guards in?" face, Guevara's "at 48 he's the youngest champ in AEW history" line) was actually funny. I could see people disagreeing on the overall tone, but I liked what they were going for.

-Women's tag was fun, with an especially fun performance from Jamie Hayter. I dug her aggression, loved her lariats, loved the way she would dispatch Riho with condescension. Riho isn't great but she has great energy, which goes a long way as an underdog babyface. Shanna felt like a pro, and Sakura really stuck the landing on all her sequences with Riho. The magistral spamming in the end could have looked like absolute trash, but instead it was a perfect combo of Riho's speed with Sakura's tight execution. Sakura's magistral looked like something that should finish a match.

-Brandon Cutler is a spitting image for young Sid Haig. He needs to lean into that more. A Spider Baby gimmick would be far more interesting than "also this other guy with kickpads". But we got a squash match! It didn't always look great, but damn an actual 2 minute match that wasn't hyper competitive bell to bell? Wild.

-Sammy Guevara really understands his role as the low ranked guy in the stable, and he bumped around in the best way in the main event. He knows how to play the athletic boob, great flunky charisma off him. Also, to say something nice about rhinestone cowboy Hangman Page - that cowpoke who does flips - he and Sammy had an awkward exchange, and I liked how Page cut the bullshit and just deadlifted Guevara off the mat and hit a great fallaway slam.

What Didn't Work:

-Every single wrestler in AEW is equally as skilled as every other wrestler in AEW. Every damn match is worked 51/49, totally equal footing until one guy wins. Trent has been exclusively a tag wrestler, but he can also go toe to toe for 15 minutes against Pac, who they're building as a top singles guy. Boris Zhukov wasn't going out there and working a hard fought 15 against Jake Roberts. There are ways to not completely kill Trent while still having Pac decisively win matches. But every match has to be an ultra competitive war, and it doesn't feel like a very effective way to build a decent hierarchy. Do they not want a hierarchy? Am I supposed to think that every person in the fed is equally talented? This is not even bringing up the weekly complaint that every match on Dynamite so far has had nearly the exact same pace. Evil Uno has been the only person to go out and try to slow things down, and I wasn't expecting to go into AEW being the "people should be taking more cues from Evil Uno" guy. The fart noise phantom kickout down the stretch was something that should not happen in a major fed.

-Private Party/Dark Order tag felt off, even though I liked elements of it. Uno's cannonball while Grayson hit the 450 was a great spot that deserved to be shown a lot from different angles, and I liked Uno doing things like crawling out of the corner to set up being used as a vault. But the match didn't add up to anything that ever felt cohesive.

-I don't totally understand Sakura's "heel Freddie Mercury" thing, and it stood out as even more weird since her partner was just being an outright heel. Like I get if Sakuraba would have come out doing her Mercury entrance, but it felt weird here. Plus Freddie Mercury wouldn't wear Chico Che vinyl bibs.

-I can't think of one, but has there been a cowboy wrestler lamer than Hangman Page?

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