AEW Five Fingers of Death 12/26 - 1/1

AEW Dynamite 12/28

Bryan Danielson vs Ethan Page

MD: Very complete match. It was 18 or so and felt even longer than that. It had the AEW house style fakeout, at least for Danielson matches (Punk matches were often structured this way as well), where they go through a pretty full match in 5 minutes, the sort of match you'd often get across the way, then have a fakeout on the finish and go into the actual stretch of heat. This one went further. The first bit came with Danielson avoiding comeuppance from Stokely's interference but then falling to it on the outside. In general, I enjoyed Stokely being out there as we haven't had a lot of Danielson vs a Heenan type manager over the last ten years or so. The second bit came from Stoke moving Page out of the way much deeper into the match. That's when things seemed to really open up. That's not to say everything before it wasn't good. It was solid, with the fans into Danielson punishing Page in the corner and, later on, dropping a 70/30 Danielson/Page dueling chants. Page leaned into his size and was fairly methodological, but it was a more interesting match after that second transition to Page on offense. His little pull up into a powerslam gave them a lot of mileage to work with, with Page going for it again out of the BCC stomps, only for Danielson to cleverly cut things off. That all built to the huge powerslam of the top, which drew the This is Awesome chants. It's telling that those came so late into the match. They built and built and built and then finally paid off and the fans, carrying the emotional weight of fifteen minutes of back and forth pro wrestling gave warranted appreciation to the payoff. I could have maybe used one more bit of cleverness on the finish, given how long they went, but Danielson slipping out of something, dodging something, hitting the knee, the stomps, the Regal Stretch (not even acknowledged on commentary), is a perfectly acceptable way to end any match.