Week In Wrestling: 18th to 24th July 2022

Here’s week 4 of my ongoing what’s-going-on-in-wrestling coverage. As usual, this is going to be brief thoughts on the bits I especially liked/disliked on TV shows, but I might also highlight especially interesting podcast episodes and similar. It’s also likely to end up being quite AEW-focused, since they are the only promotion I follow especially closely at the moment, but I’m sure some comments on major stories from other promotions and/or bemoaning the latest horrible mismanagement of talent by WWE will crop up here and there.

The big show this week was ROH’s Death Before Dishonor and the big news was Vince retiring from WWE, but I also watched all of AEW’s YouTube and TV offerings this week – so a busy time to be a wrestling fan. Let’s start the breakdown.

AEW Dark Elevation (18th July)

Not much to shout about in this episode, except I note that Leon Ruff is now called Leon Ruffin. Perhaps it was felt his original name was a bit too close to Lio Rush (who’s unretired again).

AEW Dark (19th July)

Likewise, this was an episode which, like a lot of Dark, was OK to have on in the background while I was working from home but didn’t include much which was especially compelling, beyond furthering the build to Death Before Dishonor. A lot of ROH talent got showcased, which was good, but they didn’t particularly need the showcase after the TV time they’ve had on Dynamite and Rampage so I’m not sure this did much for them.

That said, I do want to talk about Marina Shafir a bit. There really seems to be an issue with her presentation as a performer: I can’t remember a match she’s had where the crowd seemed genuinely enthused, and usually (like this week) the crowd is utterly dead for her match. Maybe it’s her lacklustre music or something, or maybe she needs to work more in how she carries herself with her body language or her mic skills, but either way she seems perfectly fine in-ring but just sucks the momentum out of things whenever she shows up, despite not outwardly doing anything particularly wrong. I don’t like pointing this out, but equally it’s got to the point where it’s hard to ignore.

AEW Dynamite Fyter Fest (20th July)

I’d heard ahead of time that people weren’t enthused by the amount of interference there was in the main event, but I was sort of expecting that so it wasn’t a problem for me in principle. TBS had apparently mandated some sort of shark cage-themed match to promote Shark Week on Discovery, so having the Jericho Appreciation Society suspended in the cage during the match was a reasonable way to tick that box, and the thing about that sort of stipulation is that it signals that the finish is going to be screwy. “They are suspended in a shark cage so they can’t help!” pretty much signals to the audience that the people in the cage are going to figure out a way to interfere, the entertainment is in seeing how they do it.

As it stands, the execution felt a little botchy – Garcia being able to slip out of the cage before Tay unlocked it, for instance – but it at least set up a mass brawl once Eddie’s allies came in. Yes, the end result felt like an overbooked shitshow, but that’s deathmatches when factions are involved. It feels like this can’t be the end of the Kingston-Jericho war, not least because Kingston got some measure of revenge after the finish anyway.

As for other stuff: Swerve In Our Glory’s championship celebration was the sort of high on sports entertainment and celebrity guests, low on wrestling thing which is usually WWE’s wheelhouse, but it did what it needed to do and didn’t drag on so there’s that. The Best Friends vs. Blackpool Combat Club match was OK, the Allin vs. King match was fine, but neither particularly excited me – there was no way Yuta was losing a match to someone not on the ROH PPV card immediately before the pay-per-view, and the House of Black still seem to be in a bit of a rut – but if Miro’s two-different-lenses-in-the-sunglasses thing was hinting at a future alignment with the House, he might give them the shot in the arm they have badly needed. Athena and Willow vs. the Baddies pretty much established that Athena vs. Jade is the match people want to see, so hopefully we keep building towards that.

Christian and Luchasaurus vs. Varsity Blondes was a setup for Jungle Boy’s return, which got a good pop, but Luchasaurus just siding with Jungle Boy again right away was weird – if he folds so easily, why did he side with Christian in the first place? This needs some sort of explanation, otherwise it just makes Luchasaurus look like a fair-weather friend and fundamentally disloyal. (Maybe that’s the intention, but if so it should be followed through on.)

I have no idea who Cole Karter was, so his FTW championship match against Ricky Starks was my introduction to him. Apparently he’s ex-NXT 2.0 talent who got fired for a Wellness Policy violation and whose write-off was explained onscreen by having Tony D’Angelo (who’s working an “Italian gangster who for some reason is a wrestler” gimmick) say he’s “sleeping with the fishes”, so booking him for a Shark Week special is pretty funny. It set up a match against Danhausen for the title next week, and there’s probably fun to be had from Danhausen getting the championship and Taz getting frantic about getting it back (especially given the HookHausen tag team being a thing).

The thing which seems to have got the most positive buzz from this show was FTR’s promo promoting Death Before Dishonor, and for good reason – Dax’s story about his daughter overcoming her heart condition setting himself up to say “I’m gonna fight like an 8-year-old girl” and making that sound incredibly badass was both a cleverly thought-through promo and an excellent delivery. I’d already decided I was going to watch Death Before Dishonor before this, but I was doubly committed afterwards, and I’m sure it made some PPV sales too.

Week In Wrestling: 11th to 17th July 2022

Here’s week 3 of my ongoing what’s-going-on-in-wrestling coverage. As usual, this is going to be brief thoughts on the bits I especially liked/disliked on TV shows, but I might also highlight especially interesting podcast episodes and similar. It’s also likely to end up being quite AEW-focused, since they are the only promotion I follow especially closely at the moment, but I’m sure some comments on major stories from other promotions and/or bemoaning the latest horrible mismanagement of talent by WWE will crop up here and there.

AEW Dark Elevation (11th July)

This episode of Elevation had ROH’s Caprice Coleman on commentary, I suspect as part of the ongoing project to familiarise AEW fans with the ROH team as part of the Death Before Dishonor preparation. For me, the match of the night was Julia Hart vs. J.C.; Julia’s repackaging as part of the House of Black has been a weirdly slow, stop-start thing, but here she seems to have figured out how to make that work for her in the ring and it really made the match stand out.

AEW Dark (12th July)

Though there was a fair chunk of matches from Universal Studios this episode, the big news here concerned the use of footage from other promotions – Thunder Rosa had a match in TJPW against Mina Yamashita, whose upset win means she’ll get a shot at the AEW Women’s World Championship later, and PAC fought Shota Umino in RevPro as his first defence of the AEW Mid-Atlantic Championship.

Both of these were on PPVs for the respective companies, but evidently AEW were able to swing a deal which let them give away the matches for free on YouTube. It’s a smart move, I think: one thing that has been refreshing about AEW is their openness to letting talent work outside bookings, the vast majority of those are going to be streamed online these days so the footage of the shows will exist, it makes sense to spruce up Dark or Elevation with this sort of material. It’s an easy thing for most smaller promotions to agree to, unless they have some contractual entanglement preventing it, because it serves as an advertisement of them to the AEW audience, who are probably more likely to check out a small indie’s offerings than the general WWE audience (especially when you consider that this is the segment of the AEW viewership who keeps up with Dark). It also means that AEW can use these excursions to set up future AEW matches and give people a way to catch up on the background to those.

Hopefully, AEW do this more – I really think any outside appearance by AEW talent should at least be considered for this if only to help elevate the roster’s profile across the board – because it certainly seems to have been successful here. It also suggests a particularly interesting direction for the All-Atlantic belt – if it’s meant to be a thing which gets defended in promotions worldwide as a sort of touring title, that immediately helps distinguish it from the other singles’ championships. It also helps emphasise that going on this sort of sabbatical isn’t a bad thing but is a useful and important part of AEW’s wider strategy, which is probably good for locker room morale.

AEW Dynamite Fyter Fest (13th July)

Fyter Fest has evolved into a two-week spectacular spanning Dynamite and Rampage, so I suppose it makes sense they’d try to push the boat out to start it off. The TNT Championship match between Orange Cassidy and Wardlow and the “world championship eliminator” between Moxley and Takeshita (basically, the title was not on the line, but if Takeshita won he’d have had a shot at Moxley’s belt) were both matches with zero build but told a good story in the ring, but the big news is the main event and the surprise win for Sweve In Our Glory.

It’s a big swerve for several reasons. Firstly, it’s a rare example of a “can these two tag team buddies who don’t get on learn to work together?” angle which doesn’t end with the tag team splitting. Secondly, triple threat championship matches – both in WWE and in AEW – are very often mechanisms to make it look like the champs have the numbers against them but actually let them retain, whilst letting their opponents look stronger than a straight one-on-one defeat would (because the challengers can wear each other out and the champs can swoop in to take the win).

Third, it really felt like Young Bucks vs. FTR was the big match coming to get one or the other team all the gold – but the dirt sheets are now reporting that this was never the plan, due to NJPW and AAA controlling the booking of their respective championships. It’s a shame – clearly there was audience interest in the match, there was an “FTR” chant when the Bucks came out last week to set it up, but evidently that wasn’t enough to smooth over the interpromotional politics.

If we get a match for all the gold later on down the line with FTR vs. Swerve In Our Glory or someone else, that would make me suspect New Japan as being the stick-in-the-muds here. Both AAA and NJPW are clearly fine with FTR – they put their tag championships on them – and AAA has worked nicely with the Bucks in recent history, but feelings still seem to be a little raw following the Bucks’ exit from NJPW, so that might be the complicating factor.

Elsewhere on the show: Christian was managing Luchasaurus and being mean to people on the mic again this week. Brian Pillman Jr. was the main verbal target this time, but it didn’t hit as hard as it has in previous weeks, largely because the whole “Brian Pillman would have been disappointed in you” angle has already been used by MJF. (For that matter, “Griff Garrison looks like Jungle Boy” is a crack the Dark Order used in one of their skits under Brodie Lee’s leadership, back when they were allowed to be heels.)

The JAS had a decent amount of business this week, with Jericho doing a promo to accept Eddie Kingston’s challenge to a barbed wire match next week and Jake Hager taking on Claudio Castagnoli. The build to the latter alluded to the duo’s history in their WWE incarnations as Jack Swagger and Cesaro, in which they feuded after their Real Americans tag team broke up, so naturally it got a “WE THE PEOPLE” chant, which is interesting because when Hager debuted in AEW Jericho specifically shot that down and for the most part that bit of Hager’s history has been put behind him, but perhaps AEW realise that with Claudio and Hager on opposite sides of a faction feud the comparison was always going to be made so they may as well run with it.

As far as the women’s division yet, ThunderStorm seems to still be a thing and Britt Baker and Jamie Hayter seem to be a natural tag team, so perhaps women’s tag titles are on the horizon. Serena Deeb vs. Anna Jay was alright but felt somewhat low-stakes – it was never credible that Deeb would take a significant loss when she’s being built up for her ROH title shot. That said, the backstage segment after the match between Anna and Tay Conti suggests there might be a story developing there – either with them feuding, or with Anna turning heel, reuniting with Tay, and being part of this nascent tag scene the women’s division seems to be developing.

AEW Rampage Fyter Fest (15th July)

Gresham vs. Moriarty was the standout match this week, mostly for what came after it – namely, Claudio Castagnoli being announced as Gresham’s ROH world championship challenger for Death Before Dishonor. Word has it that the original plan was for Claudio to debut at that, but Bryan’s injury necessitating a substitute for Blood & Guts prompted his early call-up, so here we’re probably getting the original plans back on track, which might in turn hint at the plans for him in the long term.

It also means there’s two Blackpool Combat Club members in title matches on the PPV – Wheeler’s defending his ROH Pure Championship – and it does feel like the Combat Club, as the “credible pro wrestling rules, sports entertainment drools” faction, fits the ROH ethos perfectly. We’ll see where that goes.

Week In Wrestling: 4th to 10th July 2022

Last week I decided to start a series of articles on my thoughts on the week’s wrestling and wondered how long I’d keep it going; well, here’s week 2. As mentioned last time, this is going to be brief thoughts on the bits I especially liked/disliked on TV shows, but I might also highlight especially interesting podcast episodes and similar. It’s also likely to end up being quite AEW-focused, since they are the only promotion I follow especially closely at the moment, but I’m sure some comments on major stories from other promotions and/or bemoaning the latest horrible mismanagement of talent by WWE will crop up here and there.

AEW Dark Elevation (4th July)

This was billed as a 4th July special, but it was another Elevation that could have been a Dark, and barely over half an hour – I expect AEW realised that much of the US audience wouldn’t be hitting YouTube to watch on Independence Day and so presented a set of low-stakes storyline-light matches to cover for that.

We saw lots of Dark Order again in prominent positions, and I can’t help but feel tired of them at this point. They don’t really get any storyline love – the Factory were more prominent in the Forbidden Door build – and they’ve settled into this spot where they’re constantly filling in the numbers on Dark and in battle royales. Anna Jay has come closest to getting any traction, and notably her ring gear has been reverting to her pre-Dark Order style, so perhaps she’s being positioned for greater things, and it’s hard not to note that some of the talent who’ve drifted away from AEW when their contract has run out has come from the Dark Order – and none of those are people you look at and think “wow, Tony Khan was absurd to let this person go”.

It’s not that any of them are bad, it’s just that they are not used in any way which is remotely exciting. To an extent, this isn’t Tony Khan’s fault: his hands are a little tied booking them because the death of Brodie Lee makes it impossible to present them as heels any time in the near future, but at the same time I can’t really point to any faces higher on the card than them and say “there’s a Dark Order person who deserves that spot more”. We’ll see how long they stay in limbo.

AEW Dark (5th July)

Case in point: the main event of this show from the former Impact Zone at Universal Studios was another Dark Order match, and it was probably the least interesting match on the show. The opener with Lee Moriarty getting a win and being built up on commentary for a Ring of Honor title shot, and the other ROH-adjacent stuff happening during the show, might be the big story here; Death Before Dishonor is coming up at the end of the month and reportedly Warner/TBS want AEW to do more PPVs, so Ring of Honor might be the solution there: it gives an outlet for talent not currently used on AEW’s main shows and lets AEW put on more PPVs without necessarily disrupting the build process they currently have based around four PPVs per year.

AEW Dynamite (6th July)

Ah, that’s why Dark’s been Dark Order-heavy lately: Dynamite and Rampage this week came from Rochester, Brodie Lee’s home town, so obviously tributes on commentary and a face spot from the Dark Order was on the cards. It was another Dark Order vs. The Factory segment, but little Negative One has trolled the shit out of QT on Dark regularly enough that it made sense for QT to come out and challenge Negative One to a fight; Negative One played his part well, teasing giving a promo on the mic before QT came out and then doing the Scrappy Doo “let me at him! let me at him!” body language as Evil Uno held him back. After the inevitable beatdown of QT by Hangman Page and the Dark Order happened, Negative One threatened to pin QT once he turns 18; who knows if he’ll actually want to by then or if he’ll get over it and see AEW as a fun thing he got to appear on after his Dad died, but if he does it, talk about long-form storytelling.

The other thing Brodie Lee managed to do in his short time in AEW was win the TNT title, and Wardlow got to open the show by doing exactly that. As was only logical, the street fight stipulation was largely used to let American Top Team use the numbers advantage against Wardlow, but they did it with a bit more strategy than just sending everyone in at once and on the whole I think it worked: it meant that Wardlow beating the numbers simultaneously felt like more of a legitimate challenge, but at the same time meant it didn’t seem absurd that he’d manage it (because he wasn’t just scattering everyone at once), and throwing American Top Team members at each other was a good way to take them all out of action at once so Wardlow could finally put away Scorpio Sky. I worry that Sky’s been a bit of a weak champion (he keeps having these brief reigns and then losing) and the belt’s being hot-shotted a bit, but maybe there’s nothing so wrong with having a secondary belt getting hot-shotted (in a way it helps elevate the main belt).

The setup for Young Bucks vs. Team Taz vs. Swerve In Our Glory next week was good, though it’s pretty obvious that what the audience wanted to see was Young Bucks vs. FTR for all the gold; it would make sense in any event to take a while about building that, not least because that match has already happened, but also because you have four promotions’ world tag team championships involved in that equation (and Tony Khan only owns two of the promotions in question). You don’t run that match without clearing it with AAA and NJPW, and you definitely don’t run that match on free television when you can put it on pay-per-view. (Indeed, FTR were busy setting up a match with the Briscoes for the Death Before Dishonor PPV.)

Christian Cage’s heel turn continues. I was left troubled by him using Jeff Hardy’s DUI arrest as part of his promo against Matt Hardy; on the one hand, given the history between those three I can’t believe he’d go there without getting some degree of backstage approval from Jeff, on the other hand I do wonder whether it just isn’t worth going there even if Jeff does theoretically consent: multiple promotions have ended up making Jeff’s issues part of their booking, and a large part of that comes down to his public screwups making it impossible to ignore, but you have to start questioning whether it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at some point.

The Gunn Club Ass Boys lost the audience’s sympathy comprehensively by stopping Max Caster doing the Acclaimed rap when they were coming down to the ring for the 8-man tag match (Acclaimed and Ass Boys vs. Fuego del Sol, Leon Ruffin, and Bear Country), but that was all a prelude to the post-match beatdown when the Ass Boys attacked the Acclaimed – only for Billy Gunn to swerve and side with his sons against the Acclaimed (when he’d been treating the latter as his favourites for weeks). This feels like a setup for an Acclaimed face turn, and perhaps this is a good call – it’ll certainly be nice to have Max Caster not trying to be deliberately offensive with his pre-match raps, and he and Bowens clearly have the affection of the audience.

Nia Jax and Marina Shafir vs. Toni Storm and Thunder Rosa was interesting, mostly because ThunderStorm is an interesting team. That said, with Toni at the top of the women’s rankings, surely another championship challenge is in her near future – but perhaps if women’s tag belts are coming that’ll be the angle, or maybe she can go after Jade Cargill’s TBS title.

As for stuff which made less impact on me, Rush vs. Penta was a good debut one-on-one for the former, Eddie Kingston’s promo was largely a setup for Ruby Soho getting attacked by Tay Conti and the JAS, which I guess is further pushing Ruby into the uneasy Eddie-Blackpool Combat Club alliance, Mark Sterling trying to get Swerve Strickland thrown out of AEW was largely a setup for comedy backstage segments but at least got a Rampage match together, and J.R. once again did the weird thing where he comes out halfway through the show, so I guess this is how it works from now on. Oh, and we got several promos from JAS members post-Blood and Guts which seem designed to steer them in a less comedic, more serious direction, which is probably a good call. The world title match with Brody King vs. Jon Moxley was good, but it was pretty evident that Brody wasn’t going to get it (because if anyone’s at the head of the queue to get gold in the House of Black it’s Malakai).

AEW Rampage (8th July)

This was a ROH-heavy episode, with Tully Blanchard Enterprises and John Gresham aligning, and Mercedes Martinez and Serena Deeb falling out; evidently Tony Khan is taking Warner/TBS’s expressed desire that AEW run more PPVs as permission to keep doing ROH stuff on TV, so that ROH shows can make up some of those additional shows. The main event, though, was the best match here, with Eddie Kingston and Konosuke Takeshita going from “never interacted before” to “making you care about this more than anything else on the show” in less than fifteen minutes. The main event of Orange Cassidy vs. Tony Nese was well-chosen, because both men (and their entourages) are good with comedy angles, but at the same time Cassidy and Nese can also really go in the ring, which is a combination which offers something for everyone (unless you’re the sort of person who finds even a hint of comedy in a match absolutely ruins it, but if you are I don’t know how you are still watching wrestling).

Vince McMahon Being An Absolute Piece of Shit (Longer Than I Have Been Alive)

Meanwhile over at WWE the revelations about Vince’s hush money payments grind on, and this time it involves covering up sexual assault. I can only hope this hastens Vince’s exit from the business: it’s no longer about him absolutely botching WWE’s creative process, it’s now about making sure he doesn’t have this level of control and power over others ever again.

Is WESUK the First Wrestling Promotion To Be Destroyed By Crypto-Apes?

Remember that Wrestling Entertainment Series UK thing which came out of nowhere in late May, with promises to run a big show at the Motorpoint Arena in Nottingham and show it on PPV? As everyone surely expected, it didn’t end up happening. I didn’t even bother buying the PPV on Fite, so I don’t need to worry about getting a refund, but since I last wrote about this shitshow the drama has only gotten funnier so I may as well jot down a reminder of what went down here for future reminiscence (and to drag up in case WES try to return, in the UK or elsewhere).

The originally planned June 4th date was postponed, with the reason given being that they hadn’t realised it would clash with the Queen’s Jubilee weekend. Why a national holiday in the UK should make it more difficult to persuade people enjoying a long weekend to go see a wrestling show was not explained. A chunk of the talent were not able to make the new date and had to pull out. The card as advertised a week out from the July 9th date was as follows:

• Alistair Overeem vs. Moose (WESUK Men’s World Championship)
• Lina Fanene (FKA Nia Jax) vs. TBD (WESUK Women’s World Championship)
• Legion of Pain (FKA Authors of Pain) vs. B.T. Gunn and Kez Evans (WESUK Men’s World Tag Team Championship)
• Steph De Lander and Anastasia vs. She Wolves (WESUK Women’s World Tag Team Championship)
• Samuray Del Sol (FKA Kalisto) vs. Lince Dorado
• Dean Muhtadi (FKA Mojo Rawley) vs. Damo Mackle (FKA Killian Dain)
• Eric Young vs. Zac Zodiac
• Levis Valenzuela Jr. (FKA No Way Jose) vs. Jody Fleish

It’s pretty apparent that they’ve had to paste over a lot of the cracks here with local indie talent, and not all the cracks are even pasted over – maybe they had a surprise in store for Lina/Nia’s opponent, but really when you are advertising your first show you can’t trade on surprises, you need a name to actually draw. As I mentioned in my last article, the arena they were going to run in seats 10,000, and I think WWE with all of its marketing reach would have struggled to fill it with the card that WESUK had originally advertised: that only goes double here. As previously, nothing against the talent involved, but the idea that any of these people are names so big that they can get a brand new promotion from “total unknown” to “filling 10,000 seat arenas” at the drop of a hat is absurd.

Week In Wrestling: 27th June to 3rd July 2022

I’ve decided to start up a new feature here where I do a regular rundown of the wrestling content I’ve enjoyed in the past week – mostly this is going to be brief thoughts on the bits I especially liked/disliked on TV shows, but I might also highlight especially interesting podcast episodes and similar. It’s also likely to end up being quite AEW-focused, since they are the only promotion I follow especially closely at the moment, but I’m sure some comments on major stories from other promotions and/or bemoaning the latest horrible mismanagement of talent by WWE will crop up here and there.

AEW Dark Elevation (27th June)

This was an Elevation which could have been a vanilla Dark; that’s not a criticism of any of the talent on the show, it’s just that it felt a bit less consequential than Elevation usually is. Perhaps this was down to logistics: it was recorded before the Forbidden Door PPV to air after, so on the one hand it couldn’t really build to anything that was happening at Forbidden Door but on the other it would have been difficult for it to build to anything happening after it. (The Dark Order vs. Acclaimed and the Gunn Club match, for instance, didn’t include any references to the Gunn Club skipping out of the PPV match.) With the show in a holding pattern, the biggest revelation was probably Julia Hart’s new House of Black-aligned outfit and some feats of strength from John Silver in his match.

AEW Dark (28th June)

Taz and Excalibur’s digressions and jokes on commentary are usually the best bit of Dark, and this episode was no exception, but there were some noteworthy matches here. Athena’s cyberpunk look is growing on me – it feels like a clear shift from the werewolf-adjacent aesthetic she had in WWE as Ember Moon whilst still suiting her – and she got a decent showcase match. Willow Nightingale also seems to be being built up, though it’s less clear to me whether that’s for an AEW main roster spot or for Ring of Honor stuff.

On the latter note, we had another ROH Pure Championship defence for Wheeler Yuta, and I think the show did a better job this time of explaining ROH’s Pure Rules. Part of me thinks that one of the Dark shows – this or Elevation – should just rebrand as Ring of Honor, and stuff like this only reconfirms that opinion, particularly when the match was this good.

AEW Dynamite: Blood and Guts (29th June)

In principle I like AEW’s concept of doing special episodes of Dynamite and Rampage from time to time which are a bit more elevated than the usual ones but aren’t quite as significant as their full-fledged PPVs. It’s more elegant than the way WWE has some PPVs which are clearly the important ones and some which just aren’t, and it’s not entirely apparent which is which. That said, in the case of Blood and Guts I feel like it ended up being a bit too close to Forbidden Door – it meant the build for both events was mingled in a not necessarily useful way.

That said, the show started winning me over early on with plot points like Dan Lambert demanding that Best Friends be barred from ringside for not having manager’s licences. It’s a nice old-school wrestling bit which lots of promotions don’t think about any more, and the best thing about it is that you can pull this trick once but it doesn’t mean every heel should be using the same tactic in future. (For one thing, once someone has pulled the stunt once, there’s an in-kayfabe reason for people to make sure they have their paperwork in order going forwards, at which point the trick stops working – for another, it was based on the idea of the local athletics commission having these regulations, so for a touring promotion like AEW you can simply say that most of the local commissions don’t have those rules; it’s not like anyone is going to check.) The actual match that was in aid of, Ethan Page vs. Orange Cassidy, ultimately ended up being an exercise in getting a win for Cassidy after his loss at Forbidden Door; there doesn’t seem to be that much more of a story here but it was an entertaining match, with Cassidy and Lambert’s interactions being a highlight.

Christian starting a new evil faction with a heel version of Luchasaurus feels like a riff on what Edge was doing with Judgement Day in WWE a little while ago, before they had Judgement Day turn on him. It does make me wonder what they’re going to do once they bring Jack Perry back – the most obvious direction here is for him to go through Luchasaurus to get to Cage, the question I have is whether they do that with him still doing the Jungle Boy gimmick, or whether they use this as an opportunity to get him over as a more serious character. It’s clear they regard him as a future star to build up, but it may be that the whole “a boy and his dinosaur” thing just doesn’t quite have the gravitas needed to carry a major title; I can’t say that Jurassic Express’s tag title run did much for me.

Scorpio Sky vs. Wardlow for the TNT championship was set up for next week. It’s a street fight, at Sky’s suggestion, and usually I’d regard the face as being a fool for agreeing to the heel’s chosen match stipulation like that (especially one which effectively lets a faction member use the numbers advantage all they like), but in this case I think it makes sense: they noted in the promo that Wardlow has already had a crack at Sky for the title and lost, so he’s not in a position to dictate terms, but at the same time he’s also been built as such a monster that it makes sense that he thinks he can take all of American Top Team at once.

FTR teaming up with Danhausen against Max Caster and the Gunn Club ended up winning me over, even though I wasn’t sure at first what FTR’s in-kayfabe reason for the teamup was. I guess the idea is that Danhausen is fairly low down on the power scale and FTR helping out the little guy against superior numbers helps cement their face turn, and at the end of the day the match was quite good both for providing a showcase for FTR and for letting Danhausen seem a little more effective in the ring than he has tended to come across as in his AEW run so far.

It was also a good way to let FTR get a fairly old-school tag match against the Gunns; your typical tag match usually involves one partner on the face team taking a lot of offence and having to scramble to get the hot tag so the faces can then turn it around, but for either Dax or Cash to take a bunch of offence against Austin or Colton just wouldn’t seem credible, so having Danhausen there to get beat on made it work. The match also served to set up both Anthony Bowens to reveal himself as having healed up, and then Billy Gunn turning on his own sons to favour the Acclaimed, as has been teased for a while, so we’ll see where that goes.

Leila Grey vs. Jade Cargill was another squash match to pad Cargill’s winning streak and then advance the plot with Athena and Kris Statlander coming after Cargill in the post-match angle. Leila Grey allying with Cargill to fend off Athena and Statlander was interesting, as was Cargill’s apparent ingratitude (undermining Stokely’s work getting Grey’s help): it was certainly a bit more of an interesting spotlight than many one-appearance-and-done bookings AEW’s offered, so maybe we’ll see more of Grey in the future.

The Blood and Guts match was, of course, the big highlight here. It was a Blood and Guts/Wargames match, it was messy because those things always are but there were a lot of wild moments, with Eddie’s dogged pursuit of Jericho being a highlight, as was Guevara doing the Mick Foley spot and Cesaro swinging Jericho atop the cage.. I also liked Ruby Soho coming out to take down Tay Conti when she tried to interfere on behalf of the Jericho Appreciation Society; this seems to mostly be playing on the established characterisation they’ve got of Ruby being one of the few people Eddie gets on well with, but if she gets to join Blackpool Combat Club I’ll be quite pleased. Eddie getting bummed about the match ending so he couldn’t hurt Jericho more was a good character touch… but dude, you have him right there and helpless, just keep going, you know?

Reportedly Santana got injured for real in the match, which just adds to AEW’s recent injury woes. One would think that there’d come a point when enough of your roster is on the shelf that you start thinking “maybe we delay this match which is prone to cause injury”, but I guess not.

Oh, and what’s with them doing J.R.’s entrance partway through shows? They did that for Forbidden Door too. He apparently renewed his contract lately, has he moved over to half shifts or something?

AEW Rampage (1st July)

By far the standout feature of this episode was the Royal Rampage match, which is an artful way of doing something clever with having two wrestling rings set up next to each other (because, of course, this episode of Rampage was recorded at the same taping as Dynamite so the Blood and Guts ring setup was still there). Battle royales have a perennial issue where if too many people are in the ring it’s impossible for anything to stand out, so spreading a 20-competitor battle royale over two rings makes a lot of sense, and the gimmick where each wrestler is assigned to one ring and then whoever wins the battle royale in each ring has to fight each other in a conventional match to get an overall winner is clever. Brody King winning feels like it’s probably not going to go anywhere – he earned himself a shot at Moxley’s Interim Men’s World Championship, but are they really going to go with House of Black vs. Blackpool Combat Club as an ongoing story when both factions seem to have other fish to fry? It seems unlikely, but let’s see.