AEW Five Fingers of Death: Week of 6/27 - 7/3

AEW Dynamite 6/29

Blackpool Combat Club+ (Moxley/Kingston/Castagnoli/Yuta/Santana/Ortiz) vs. Jericho Appreciation Society (Jericho/Hager/Guevara/Menard/Parker/Garcia) - Blood & Guts

MD: A lot of times I'll catch the show in the moment (or the next morning) and then double back later in the week to write it up, but it's beyond my current ability to break down every story beat of this. That would probably be doing the match a disservice anyway. There were clever bits of layout at times, clever spots, clever timings. Obviously thought was put into this. It's a match for your heart and your gut and your bloodlust, though, not for your eyes and your head and your mind. More than that, I'd say it was three matches in one.

The first half was more produced, was the place where a lot of those clever spots factored in. It was more of a War Games of the last thirty, thirty-five years. It was the sort of a match that could build to the crowd going nuts for a Jake Hager staredown in 2022, where Claudio could establish himself as a force by wrestling Sammy and Garcia for the first time, where Angelo Parker could do an all time great stooge job trying to run away from everyone, where Moxley, Yuta, and Claudio could triple team a guy. The third that followed was visceral and gory. Mox was the guy driving it. Mox was the deathmatch wrestler come home. He may have written a book. He may have the belt. He may be a world-renown superstar, but if you read that book, you read about the guy who was elated about getting a chance to be in Cage of Death. And that was the spirit that he brought here. Yes, the pile driver on to the glass was something, but everything shifted for me when he just jabbed glass into Hager's head in the corner. Somehow the match had gone from Claudio and Hager standing in opposite rings as the crowd hyped up their encounter to Mox jabbing glass into Hager's head. Everyone stood out here in their own way but it'd be crazy not to highlight Menard and Parker for the bloody messes they became.

Then you had the last ten to fifteen minutes, a scaffold match on top of the cage. The call of how the tacks were in Jericho's shoes and how that absolutely destroyed any hope of footing was spot on. We've seen guys on top of cages before, but it never felt quite so perilous. Jericho and Kingston on their knees throwing hands felt gripping. Maybe it was the shoes. Maybe it was just Kingston's homicidal portrayal, the ill intention he had for Jericho to start, the grin on his face after tossing Sammy, the way he went through all the stages of grief on the finish when he realized that Claudio had gotten the submission before he did (all the way to a begrudging acceptance that won't possibly last). I know Wrestlemania had a moment or two of the old spectacle, whether it was Sami's match or Owens/Austin, but just imagine being Claudio getting the pop and the spotlight he did Sunday night and then rolling into the big moments he had here. Given what we know, nothing was more insane than the giant swing atop the cage and then post match he was able to run to all four sides like he was Hogan in 1986. Except for 86 Hogan was never in a match like this.

There were blips and blemishes, but they more or less added to things. It was a shame Santana went down almost immediately, especially when he's been out of the picture relatively in the last couple of months, but it ramped up the tension by making the man advantage more or less permanent. The bit with the bottle was unexpected, but it ended well enough with Mox feeling its effect. So many guys laying out for the scaffold match portion feels problematic to some degree but it's not like they hadn't been through a war and the announcers covered well by talking about how the blood loss and the potassium loss had everyone cramping up. So, overall, these things added to the feeling of unpredictability as much as as distracted from anything. It doesn't always work out that way but in a total package like this, it did. No one's going to remember the image of Conti trying to push a water bottle through the cage in five years. They're going to remember the glass and the swing atop the cage and the grief on Eddie Kingston's face when he came so close to getting everything he wanted and had it taken away by the guy who went to greener pastures instead of fighting him over a decade ago and that, on this night, saved him from the Walls before stealing his glory. 

AEW Rampage 7/1

Royal Rampage

MD: This has Dustin and Darby, so it's getting covered. Writing about two AEW battle royales in so short a time period is a little tricky though. On the one hand, this had so much of what I want out of one of these. The combination of the old Houston two-ring style and the Royal Rumble layout gave people their moments and led to some narrative possibilities better than the casino battle royales. I'd say that there wasn't that same sense of anticipation for the next entrant that the Royal Rumble tends to have, but that's because we knew everyone coming in, and I think, because the numbers came so quickly that people watching were still engaged with what was happening in the rings and not quite ready for the next entrant yet. So that's the one hand. The other is that the pacing of eliminations in the last few minutes was probably a little off and they should have found a way to make that more measured and commentary should have played up King being fresh while Darby and Page had started it off.

That's not the point though. A year ago to this month, I hadn't watched more than five minutes of AEW. I probably caught a little bit of the first Elevation because I was curious about Tony and Wight on commentary. That was it. Now, I pretty much watch all of it every week and that means I have investment in just about everyone on the roster. Sometimes it's positive. Sometimes it's negative. Sometimes it's both. For a guy like Swerve, it's both. His off-center, contrived, flowing, cooperative offense bugs me and takes me out of every match, but I'm still curious how the beef between him and Keith Lee is going to play out. The moment where they faced each other one in each ring had me thinking that might be how things ended. Maybe it wasn't a great idea to tease that when it wasn't going to be how things would end, but it probably was, because it shows the richness of the characters and of the inherent possibilities. Then, he went on and eliminated Cassidy, so there's reason for a match there (even if it's probably the Cassidy match I would want to see least) and was eliminated by Starks and Hobbs, furthering that program.

Again, all of this goes back to me, when I was 10, reading the yearly WWF Superstars magazines which had bios of every wrestler and wanting to see how each one would feel about the other if they were to interact, especially if they weren't in some program with one another. AEW will put on offbeat matches; they do it all the time. But the roster is so big that you don't get to see Starks and Hobbs interact with Adam Page all that often, or at least not in a year or two. You haven't had the chance to see Silver and Page interact lately, or Silver and Hobbs interact. Takeshita and Swerve or Darby probably won't have a match anytime soon. So you get the things you have seen lately, like Matt Hardy helping Darby up and facing off against Butcher and Blade or Rush and Penta going at it, but you also see Brody King go right after Dustin or Butcher and Max Caster having a brief alliance. The wrestling is never going to be great in one of these, so the character interaction and the sheer amount of stuff that they pack in becomes the appeal, and I thought it worked well on that level on this night. There's always going to be missed opportunities in something like this (how did they not have Dante do some sort of quadruple jump with the rings?) but they hit enough of the possibilities at play, all the way to the image of King dropping Darby to the floor, that I was happy with it.