AEW Five Fingers of Death 1/8 - 1/14

MD: Brief programming note. Puerto Rico should be back this week. We ended up getting our hands on a bunch of footage not on Youtube so we've been trying to make sense of it all. It will help the project overall. Way too much wrestling going on right now. I'm not going to hit everything from the last week, but I am grabbing one match from Dynamite, Rampage, and Collision each. Only one will annoy you and I apologize in advance.

AEW Rampage 1/12/24

Eddie Kingston vs. Wheeler Yuta

MD: When I call Yuta a "rat boy", I do so with the most possible affection. I hope that's apparent. It's not that he's a direct heir to Yoshinari Ogawa, because he's not, but I just see the parallels. Honestly, here, he was more of a buzzing fly, just one with the technical precision of the ROH Pure Champion.

Yuta had both nothing and everything to prove. He's already the Pure Champion (with this being one of only maybe 5 times where the Pure Champion was in a situation to win the ROH World Championship as well). He recently defeated Shibata. He's been on a run on Rampage. On the other hand, Eddie is higher in the hierarchy and he just mowed through the rest of the BCC.

Eddie came in like the ace he is, forward looking, ready to lock up in the center of the ring. Yuta dodged him, too a powder, only engaged on his terms. The idea wasn't to break Eddie, I think, not like Claudio and Danielson and Moxley tried to do. The idea was to frustrate him, to annoy him, to draw him out. Yuta wanted to isolate his hand, and then, once started to work on it, he wanted to frustrate Eddie so much that he would want to use it on Yuta's face and chest again and again and again, creating a self-defeating but entirely human and understandable wedge that would allow Yuta to stay into the match.

It worked too. Yuta made himself as annoying and punchable as possible even as he chipped away at Eddie's hand. It let him stay in the match when Eddie should have been able to get some distance on him. It let him come so close with a top rope DDT following Eddie deciding that he had absolutely no choice in life and that he had to chop Yuta instead of doing something else. That brought Yuta close, but it wasn't enough to put Eddie away and without that, the good gameplan could only be so good.

All it took, after all, was Eddie catching him once. And he did, trapping the arms and throwing him over, ducking under and hefting him. The size differential was what it was. Yuta would deviate to try to throw a bomb or two to get Eddie in a position to put him away. All he had to do was chip away enough to lock in the seatbelt, but being brash and young and human himself, Yuta lost the plot down the stretch. That's the thing about Eddie: he's pretty punchable too when he's surviving all that you have to throw at him. Eventually, the goading shots of Yuta turned into things full of actual rancor. That meant he was playing Eddie's game, and when you play the continental champ's game, you ultimately lose.

AEW Collision 1/13/24

Dustin Rhodes vs. Willie Mack

MD: Every time they heat Dustin up for one last big match, it's a gift. That they keep on doing it is a testament to just how good Dustin is. That they're doing it this time around so he can face Christian Cage on Dynamite, well, that's a gift for me personally. Thank you for the gift.

This didn't go long, but I thought every exchange was more or less what it should have been. Dustin could hold his own against Mack's strength and speed and size early but it took little flourishes like putting a hand up to ask for a second or using the handshake to create openings. Mack, however, brought so much to the table, that he was able to not just get back in it but do a little dance before controlling in the corner or the Goldust taunt before hitting a standing moonsault.

He went for too much, too soon, however, and Dustin got back into it not by overpowering Mack, but by taking advantage of a mistake, which is what you'd want between these two. The problem with the Destroyer, as much as anything else, is not that it's inherently flippy or anything like that. It's that it usually makes the wrestler taking it do something that breaks the suspension of disbelief; either they have to move in a way that they normally wouldn't in any other match or they have to stay in a position for too long. Here, it made sense that Mack might be winded in that specific way after the missed moonsault, so I didn't mind it. It set up the finishing stretch of Dustin hitting some visually impressive power stuff (set up by believable experienced, finesse counters). To say I'm looking forward to Dustin vs Christian is an understatement. I hope it gets enough time on a show with at least two other title matches even if it's probably just a stop on the road to whatever Christian will be up to next. 

AEW Dynamite 1/10/24

Hangman Adam Page vs. Claudio Castagnoli

MD: Of my many pro wrestling islands, the one that feels loneliest is my dislike of many if not most Hangman Adam Page matches. Coming into his return in October 2021, I'd never even seen an Adam Page match. I had no preconceived notions. He won the title shortly thereafter and early in the reign he was up against Danielson and Archer those left me feeling fairly positive. The more I saw though, the more I started to pick up on patterns. You see something off in one match and that could be anything. You see something in two, and you still can't be sure. There are agents. There are multiple wrestlers with inputs on every match. There are weird nights and TV constraints and all sorts of other things. But you keep seeing it again and again and it becomes pretty clear.

A few things were apparent. He was almost entirely lacking low and mid-level offense. Everything he did was a bomb. No bodyslams or standing vertical suplxes or backbreakers or side slams or even things you'd expect from his character like corner clotheslines. Because everything he did was a bomb, that meant he would be throwing bombs too early in matches and there'd be nowhere to go, nowhere to escalate to. I'm almost certain this helped him get over because it made him look better than his peers that were playing by more conventional pro wrestling rules. It's the same reason why Suplex City Brock feels like such a towering presence. He's doing stuff no one else generally does at times that almost no one does them. It's also a reason why so many of the matches are unsatisfying on a rewatch and it screws up the balance of cards and shows as a whole.

This was made all the worse in scenarios where Page was driving things and has a size or hierarchical advantage. That's when he starts throwing around death valley drivers and springboard clotheslines and the fallaway slam and his moonsault in the first few minutes. It's less noticeable and less of an issue when he's fighting from underneath against a bigger threat. While probably not ideal relative to punching up and fighting back, he can use those individual bombs as hope spots against a monster. Even better is when one is used for the actual comeback spot. However, he's not often put into that situation because of his place in the hierarchy and the overall presentation of his character. And he's been rewarded time and again by the crowd for narratively dubious pro wrestling for multiple reasons. On one level, he's probably giving a lot of them what they want, excitement and sensation and dominance. Cowboy shit. The coolest match possible. The incentives have never been there for him to adapt as opposed to just going with what got him over, even when he became champion and had different responsibilities. It's just not what I want out of pro wrestling and I don't think it's sustainable. Giving the crowd what it wants isn't the same as giving the crowd what it needs.

Despite all of this, I do like the guy behind the guy in general and I see the value to him. I like the idea of him. I like his out of character interviews. I think the whole notion of being an anxious millennial cowboy is interesting. It plays with the concept of modern masculinity in a productive way. It gives the AEW crowd someone to relate to, someone to cheer for. There's that notion that every day is a struggle which fits quite well with serialized storytelling after all. There are certain physical things that Page does that are executed well. Plenty of good stuff, plenty of tools. He can be a very strong half of a whole. He's been in a number of matches against guys who can either rein him in or that are built and presented in a way that naturally force him into better structures than what we see if he's left to his own devices. He'd be an amazing Stan Hansen opponent (which makes him a pretty darn good Jon Moxley opponent). That's the thing. If he had less going for him, he wouldn't be nearly so frustrating to watch when it's his turn to drive and he sails the car over a cliff.

And I try to watch, try to keep an open mind, but when I look at the patterns, I tend to dread his matches. Another guy who isn't dissimilar is Takeshita (slightly better post-heel turn but he's all bombs with no discernible sense of when best to place them and when not to throw them); their match together was one of my least favorite AEW matches I've ever seen. It was something that most people who watched it were over the moon on. And that's ok, but I felt like I was talking a totally different language from them, that there was no middle ground or understanding to be found (or at least it wasn't a two way street; it's not hard to understand why they liked it and it's maybe harder for me to express why I loathed it).

If you want a real simple shorthand for how much I'm going to like or dislike a Hangman match, one good rule of thumb is to look for where he positions the death valley driver. If it's within the first third of the match, I'm probably going to absolutely hate the match. If it comes later, the thing at least has a fighting chance.

Here, against Claudio, the move fit pretty well into the closest thing we have to an AEW TV house style (where you have a fairly complete initial heat and comeback with signature babyface spots heading towards an apparent finish before the heel turns it back around and they go into commercial break and a second round of heat). It was his big comeback spot after Claudio took the first third of the match. It was explosive and credible as a way to help Hangman get a flurry of offense. He'd hit the fallaway slam and a dive before Claudio was able to catch him with the amazing press slam to the ramp. Afterwards, Claudio brought things back down for the break and Hangman had to pull out bigger and bigger comeback spots against Claudio's unrelenting strength. This was one where not everything was placed exactly where I would have wanted it, but where the overall effect worked because the heel was big enough and larger than life enough to make up for the holes that are often found in Hangman's narrative toolset. If you're looking at the shorthand, take a look where the death valley driver showed up in the JD Drake match as well. I liked that one too.