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This was for Cassidy’s AEW International Title.
Having only ever seen this live, it’s different on video, in the usual ways. The blood works even better when you see it up close. Commentary here — at least Taz and Excalibur — is mostly to the match’s benefit. It loses the feeling of live big match major event wrestling somewhat, but it retains those feelings in the major moments. It’s still s impressive to me, because it very easily could not have been.
I didn’t think this would work like it did.
Not just as the main event, in the wake of a thing that I have too many thoughts on to even start to go into it on a piece that isn’t expressly about it (you all have the ability to pay for AEW CM Punk match pieces if you want that), but like, in general.
Jon Moxley and Orange Cassidy do not — or did not — feel like wrestlers who I thought would work especially well together.
In saying that, I also have sort of a confession to make, or at least some sort of admission (confession implies a guilt, which is not so much the case as much as it is weird feeling), which is that the Orange Cassidy AEW International Title reign has not been something I really liked a whole lot, in a larger sense, or at least not in the way that a lot of other people have.
Like so many AEW ideas, it’s great on paper, and really great as an overall concept, seen from farther away. A long-term champion who you would not expect to be such a long term champion gaining prestige for himself and a new title. Injuries mounting up on top of each other, only for the champion to find new ways to adjust to it and beating increasingly better wrestlers and bigger names. Run it in TEW, as a fantasy booking bit on a message board, whatever, and it’s really interesting. But in the hands of Orange Cassidy, I didn’t love it. It always felt like a reach. I’m a fan and all — I’d wager I loved the act and more importantly the wrestler before a whole lot of people, he’s a DECADE IN LISTS guy whenever that finally gets done — but something about it always felt a little off. Off in a way that given the strength of the ideas, and how much I tend to like OC (please don’t call him that), and especially something like a chronic hand injury, I always felt like I should have liked more and felt weird about. A collection of good ideas that almost never resulted in a great match and only on a handful of occasions — AR Fox, Swerve Strickland, Yuta, Daniel Garcia — resulted in a match that I thought was actually good.
Great stuff conceptually, but that never came together more than a few times in a long reign, and that I didn’t think Jon Moxley — being one of the realest wrestlers alive, to the extent that I only buy a handful of wrestlers in the company (BCC, Kingston, maybe a Starks or Darby) being able to believably beat him — would be a great fit for it.
That turned out not to be the case.
Sometimes, things happen through force of talent or force of effort, and I would say that’s what happened here. Two great wrestlers, in a rougher spot for the promotion, simply deciding that they are going to have a great match.
Above everything else, the strength of this match is what Jon Moxley does with the idea of Orange Cassidy.
For years, it’s felt like people who wrestle Orange Cassidy want to be in Orange Cassidy matches, rather than figuring out how to channel him like the force of nature that he is, but this match succeeds in large part because Jon Moxley puts him into a Jon Moxley match.
So often during this reign, other wrestlers have been a little too nice and accommodating about the things he does poorly at this point — so many bad strikes — that it can undercut some of his strengths as a pure underdog. Moxley, however, never does that. He treats him like a joke until he proves he isn’t. He takes early offense, but also never sells the weak elbows, mocks him, and in how he treats Orange as an opponent, never quite feels like he’s doing anything all that phony with him or playing along with the act. So often, more serious wrestlers feel like they’re jumping down or going down a level when they do what they do against Orange, but this time, it feels like Moxley brings him up nearer to his level by never once playing the game.
What Mox does also allows Orange Cassidy to hit in a way he really hasn’t since the first PAC match and then some. The act works best against people who do not believe in or respect it, no matter what they say, and while Mox isn’t exactly [REDACTED] in terms of how great it feels to see Orange fucking get his ass in the back half, it works in a lot of the same ways. Covered in blood, so much of the other parts of this schtick beaten and torn away, Orange Cassidy simply has to fight, and it becomes real real easy to remember that before all of this, Orange Cassidy was once one of the best babyfaces in the world, and it works twice as well now that you can see his face, look him in the eyes, and see it all covered in blood.
The match isn’t quite short enough to hit that WCW Main Event Feeling, where every move feels important and like they are always trying to win, but in the last half or so of this match, it comes very very close. Goldberg vs. DDP still smokes this, but there’s something of a similar feeling to a lot of matches like that, that the underdog comes closer than you think, but is fighting something and someone so much bigger, and feels that much more heroic for meeting it with their head up and looking it in the eyes.
Orange Cassidy does that here, and I think it’s the best he’s worked in AEW — mechanically and conceptually — since right before the pandemic.
He has his openings when he turns Mox’s bloodlust against him, hitting the Beach Break on the exposed concrete when Jon overreaches, and in the match’s most triumphant moment when his classic light kicks turn into actual real kicks of genuine anger and passion, it all comes together perfectly.
Mox still trucks him, of course.
Some things are inevitable.
But when Cassidy kicks out of the Death Rider and rises up to meet the final one not only looking at him, removed from whatever detached cool there is of the act, but giving up the double bird, it’s perfect, and he gains probably more out of this than Mox does when the second one wins the title.
I don‘t know if I was wrong to think all of that stuff I thought before the match.
The match didn‘t make me suddenly love all off those matches that I simply kind of liked. On paper, Jon Moxley and Orange Cassidy still aren‘t the greatest matches for each other. Every reason I was tentative here is still there, and I am not exactly clamoring to see a rematch any time soon. Lightning rarely strikes in the same place or in the same way twice.
The beauty of pro wrestling though is that, again, this does not happen on paper, and so in the moment, I was incredibly wrong, and it whipped ass to be this wrong.
On September 3rd, 2023, Jon Moxley and Orange Cassidy had a great fucking match that left both either a little or a lot better off than they found them. Everything else comes after that.
(Even if it’s Mox’s second best ALL OUT title match main event.)
***1/4
HANDWERK 