Hangman Page vs. CM Punk, AEW Double or Nothing (5/29/2022)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor SSW Gogeta. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.

This was for Hangman Page’s AEW World Title.

I liked this a lot at the time.

Naturally, that isn’t to say I thought it was perfect or that it belonged on any end of the year lists. It wasn’t even the second best match on the show. There were flaws to it, both the obviously mechanical as well as choices in construction, and I always thought they had a better one in them that lent itself more to the blood and guts and pure narrative strengths of each man at this point in their careers, but I liked it.

Two years later, it’s very hard to look at it as just a match anymore.

So much has come out since, and even more has happened since. The clearly leaked fake Cabana firing report that, just on a gut level, feels like the work of someone who never wanted Punk here in the first place (not to hurl accusations out, there are a few potential camps, either one with a grudge or one who lost a lot of power with another genuine capital s Star on the roster). The weird shoot promo going off of that, which was carried out poorly enough that nobody totally got it and it just muddied the waters, then the others to follow, which made two of AEW’s top babyfaces each less likeable. The reports since of Hangman shooting with high chops here which feel wildly overblown, then Brawl Out, then Brawl In, CM Punk’s multiple mental breakdowns, and all of that. It’s, if not a gigantic one, a genuine inflection point in the graph of wrestling history, the sort of thing that will inspire pieces on print or video, TEW scenarios with it as the major event that went differently, and things of that nature.

History will not remember this match as a match, so much as something that was the backdrop to a bunch of other stuff that, eventually, ended the best run (All Out 2021 through this, but more liberally, through All Out 2022) in company history.

Which is a shame because, like, what did you think this place was, fuck you, I like it even more on rewatch.

Again, to be clear, it is very much not a match without flaws.

The two batched Punkshot Lariats are bad. Bad. They’re not match-ruining flubs, I don’t think, and things that would be forgotten by now if almost anyone else had done them, clearly blown up months later by people who wanted something he did to make fun of to act like all AEW was losing was a washed old guy, but they are admittedly low points in the match. Punk’s try at the Sharpshooter also looks positively rotten, on par with the infamously terrible Rock Sharpshooter. There are some other non-Punk flubs, and in general, something about the match feels not totally completed or realized. In a lot of ways, like some other CM Punk matches in AEW (the two Starks matches building to a finale that never comes, the Eddie Kingston epic), it feels like a match plotted and wrestled with a sequel in mind. Not so much that it’s lacking in offense or scope, but that the idea of the match is one that by its nature sets up a return and in the vague feeling that, despite animosity guaranteeing this would be a pipedream, these are two real talented wrestlers working some things out and figuring out how this pairing works.

Being fair too, that isn’t to say this is useless in terms of the nuts and bolts. A few rough things, both major and minor, do not ruin a match that mostly rules otherwise. Chalk it up to real anger probably, but every shot in this match looks and sounds great. There’s also, again while not totally something you can praise as an acting performance and a display of this command of character, tons of great mean little looks and reactions early on. It might not be a work, but at all times, this feels like a match between people who do not like each other at all, and there’s something really exciting and wonderful about that, especially when explored in the way that this match allows them to, full of escalating shoves, slaps, forearms dragged across the face, taunts, and the like. More in depth, the leg selling of Hangman Page in the last third or last quarter is genuinely great as well, hitting the great zone in between nerd bait and blowing it off, exactly as a sort of fluke lingering injury ought to be handled.

It is a CM Punk match though, and the areas in which these matches have always succeeded have always been the larger ones.

Narratively speaking, I think this is one of the more interesting AEW matches ever. Not in terms of crowd reaction or what it meant on a larger timeline, but in the sense that the heart and soul of the company gets genuinely thrown by, for the first time, not being the absolute 100% favorite, and has essentially lost the match before it ever begins.

The match is, I think, really spectacular at exploring that, and the difference between the two in a lot of fascinating ways.

An easy thing to look to is just Page being rattled by the crowd and making mistakes — posing longer, stealing taunts, giving Punk the room to breathe that he often didn’t give anyone else, on top of the title belt tease at the end — but there’s more there than just that. Punk’s advantages often come through classic experience-based veteran tricks, like faking stumbling by the ropes only to turn quick to knock Hanger to the floor, and in a rattled state, Page overcompensates by going too fast. When a moonsault set up fails once, Page rushes into it the next time he has the chance, and maybe hits it a little too fast and hurts his leg in the process, which hinders him just as much as any mental struggle later on. There’s also famously the last bit, which illustrates a mental lapse better than many other attempts in recent history, with Page dropping the title and going back out for the Buckshot, but plainly leaving Punk way too much time to recover, and losing because of it. It genuinely feels like a necessary step in the evolution of a promotional Ace, the first stumbling block after finally getting there, and although everything since has failed it, the match itself still does so well with these ideas.

Mostly, it’s a match and a statement about the importance of honesty and comfort. Hangman Page goes through the ringer, removed from what’s helped him overcome before, and for better or worse (mostly worse!), CM Punk has always known exactly what he is.

Punk gets him off of that distraction, the most confident man of all time waiting out a crisis of confidence, and wins the title with the GTS.

It’s the end of the match, but also the end of a lot more.

Within the next week, CM Punk would break his foot stupidly doing a dive into the crowd in celebration. Everything else goes from there, and writing this nearly two years later (5/16/2024), nothing’s been quite as great since. Page has spent most of the last two years drifting, tied down either to his loser buddies after one of the best feuds in company history (Hangman/Mox), or as a tool to get over worse wrestlers. CM Punk injured himself again in his return in September 2022, and based on all his matches since then to this point, some stellar efforts not withstanding, that very likely was the one that ended his second in-ring prime.

You never quite know what you have until it isn’t there anymore, and even though everyone at the time acknowledged Peak AEW as something that felt like an all-time run as it was happening, years removed from it, it somehow feels like we also didn’t totally know either.

This is not the end of everyting good.

Great wrestling has happened since, great wrestling will likely continue to come out of this promotion (unless you find this like ten years in the future, who knows what could happen), a lot including both men, and likely much more after you read this to come from one of them.

It is the end of the best version of this company though, for every reason — and likely even more, specific to any one individual’s tastes — that comes to mind.

For better or worse, this is one of the more important matches of the decade, right up there with Punk/Mox II in the same way. While that is absolutely a better match and an even more underrated one for all of the same reasons, I think that CM Punk vs. Hangman Page is destined to be one of the more underrated matches of its time. It’s nowhere near as great, but it is great. Beyond that, a great start to an unfinished story that one imagines is even better, in any number of ways, and if not on the level of the very best Punk work in these initial first nine months back, one that makes it clear just how much was lost, and just how great everything was that’s been torn down since.

While it would be wrong to hold this up as some ultimate illustration of what was taken from us by a year of problems with faults in every direction, it is still a great match in spite of everything, and one whose greatness feels emblematic of a time that, although very very recent, also feels like it happened a million years in the past.

A modern tragedy.

***

 

CM Punk vs. Samoa Joe, AEW All In (8/27/2023)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from frequent contributor Kai. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for CM Punk’s AXW Title/AEW Real World Title.

It’s a hard match to talk about, even months removed.

The hardest part, of course, is that as a solid 14:00 at most, this is insultingly, inexplicably, and incomprehensibly, the seventh longest match on a nine match show. Genuinely, it is embarrassingly short. Just, like, before getting into anything else, before or after, it is very obviously a match not treated with the proper respect by the company that hosted it, given that an MJF vs. Adam Cole match is over twice as long, among others, so one might understand certain other things.

First things first, just talking about it as a professional wrestling match, a lot like their other 2023 match, it feels like there is more here. That match was withholding in terms of the big stuff in a way that this just plainly is not, but it also feels like less than what they are capable of, even as older wrestlers. It feels like — funny enough — WrestleMania style peak at what a great pairing is capable of, cut down down because of the venue (not totally unfair) and because of its slot on the card (less fair, promotional malpractice, should have been the main event).

Undeniably though, it is still very great.

Punk and Joe, again, simply have a certain magic between them (someone commission the trilogy, cowards), that it feels like nothing can entirely ignore or work around. Even as a truncated and artificially shortened version, it is so hard to ignore the way every transition or counter seems to work just so naturally. I cannot speak to anything as a wrestler, as I am not one, but working/having worked in another physical or semi-physical field, you recognize when a pairing or a group has a certain chemistry or familiarity, the way people naturally know the way that the other moves, and Joe and Punk have it together like precious other pairings.

Every element of it is as correct as it could get.

Samoa Joe and CM Punk, again and in a different way more fitting to their venue now, have a match that both respects their current situation and honors their past. So many wrestlers trip over the idea of trying to do both, but two of the greatest of all time make it look so incredibly easy. In ways both small (Punk breaking out the XXX jacket again, both playing off the idea of Joe dodging guys of the ropes in the air) and big (the less continuity based bits, trading strikes, larger elements), Punk and Joe seem made to wrestle each other, in a way that Samoa Joe has never had with another, and that Punk has only ever had with an even better UPW graduate.

More than most other independent pairings turned mainstream, with the exception of those also involving Bryan Danielson and AJ Styles, few have had a better sense for what to adapt for those less involved. Joe and Punk have the good sense to know how much better this works with Punk sporting some color, but also feed into the freaks who want to hate Our Hero, giving these absolute perverts what they came for a well before the very end.

There is, of course, the other part to this. The part where this is the very end of this wonderful thing.

Following Jungle Boy’s pre-show match again using glass and saying “cry me a river” to the camera (you will not ever convince me that he wasn’t at least encouraged to do this as some sort of useful idiot), CM Punk got in a second backstage fight, in which a spoiled rich promoter supposedly felt fear for his life, and that was that.

CM Punk wrestles his final AEW match here.

Five months (and counting) later, I still have not come up with the greatest words.

Obviously, some part of it is bullshit.

The thing that I believe most is that, for the most part, CM Punk was not ever wanted in AEW by certain elements of the roster. Chalk it up to an older school philosophy or, more respectably, to simply one of the last true stars left in wrestling in the 2020s (Roman, Lesnar, Cena, Punk) who had an idea of how to protect themselves trying to do such a thing. He may not have always done the most correct thing, such as all the Cabana business or the gift cards, but given the way he elevated a lot of others, something always felt a little off to me about that, let alone everything to come after. Brawl Out was what it was, and after that, I believe that certain things happened as they did — maybe not the initial Jungle Boy glass spot, but everything after it, along with a million other things in the first two or three months of Collision — to try and force some kind of a conflict, to achieve the result a lot of people had wanted for the last two years.

In the end, ultimately, CM Punk’s time in AEW feels like reverse magical realism.

Something realer than almost anything else there is, shoved into a world full of bullshit and pure make believe, in that old pro wrestling tradition of “well, i know the the rest of this is bullshit, but this is for real”, as his veterans taught him.

Very obviously, it does not work. Not only because very often (MJF, etc.), he was working with wrestlers who play pretend but actually have less than zero understanding of the source material, but because for all the PR pretense and bullshit, this promotion has never been interested in real pro wrestling (there are many kinds of 2000s message board posters, and anyone there knows what side TK would have been on) so much as motioning towards it.

When confronted with it, thrown into that old black lodge and given the opportunity to choose between the real and the embarrassing imitation, the same thing happened as so often does. A wrestling promotion came up lacking, incapable of choosing clear right from clear wrong, and an individual wrestler did not.

At the end of it all, nineteen years after a story revolving around the idea that CM Punk knew that if he ever got Joe with the Pepsi Plunge, he could really and truly beat him, it works, not just as the end to Joe and Punk, but as the coda to CM Punk’s time as a real professional wrestler, independent of the forces that made it next to impossible for the idea of real pro wrestling to even exist anymore.

There are few better ways for CM Punk to leave than this.

Punk hits his biggest move, for the first time in nearly twenty years, and finally defeats his greatest opponent. It is not only likely the culmination of a nearly nineteen year promise, following a post-show interview on JOE VS. PUNK II swearing the move could beat Samoa Joe, but also done in the last chance he will ever have at it. Beyond that, it’s a little bit beautiful that, in the spirit of this run and the language of it, in his final chance ever at true professional wrestling, CM Punk finally achieves the only thing left worth a God damn.

You cannot script it any better.

Jordan shoves Bryon Russell just a little bit, a man who asked years prior just why he quit, and hits the shot, retiring from the real sport with number six, and that is that.

Punk beats Joe.

After all this time, he’ll say it just like Ali did.

The Champ Is Here.

***1/2

 

Hangman Page vs. Bryan Danielson, AEW Dynamite (12/15/2021)

This was for Page’s AEW World Title.

After spending his first match doing the work that both AEW and Kenny Omega failed to do for over two years in trying to present Omega as a best in the world level guy, it is now Bryan Danielson’s job once again to make up for what the promotion itself hasn’t quite been able to do on its own, with his goal this time being the creation of Adam Page as a main event entity.

If you’re reading this, I imagine you know that this goes to a one hour time limit draw.

That idea is nothing new for Bryan Danielson.

As many people know — especially many more annoying types acting as if Bryan’s been retired since 2014 or something — Bryan Danielson is no stranger to long matches. In part, Bryan Danielson made his name on longer matches. The Paul London match, multiple Samoa Joe ROH World Title matches, the seventy six minute clash against Austin Aries, a number of his ROH World Title matches, the list can go on. Some call him the greatest long match wrestler of all time, and while I don’t totally believe that, it’s something he has more practice with than just about anyone currently active in pro wrestling (count the others, you might not make it to one full hand).

I’m not quite going to say that this is better than every single one of those matches.

However, this is easily the best ever Bryan Danielson performance in a long match that there’s ever been.

Genuinely, a tour de force from the greatest professional wrestler of all time, not only putting on a more natural and convincing heel act than in those heralded mid 2000s matches (all the credit in the world to Bryan mechanically in those days, but the heel act in his ROH Title run often felt like a “look, I’m working heel!” bit, totally lacking in sincerity unless a next-level babyface like a Homicide or Nigel McGuinness in England was against him), but displaying a greater mastery of how to work matches like these against wrestlers like Page. Even when Bryan is called upon late in the match to have a hurt limb also as a heel, he manages to do what he couldn’t back in the day, and he sells it convincingly while never veering off into seeming sympathetic at all. It’s the performance of a man no longer needing to show he’s a Great Wrestler, instead radiating that out through such convincing and airtight work.

The things that have always been great about long Bryan matches are still great here. There’s a classic Bryan Danielson shell game approach to this, beginning by trying to take Page’s wind away with a lot of stomach and midsection work, before catching him slipping and going to the cut that presents itself and working on the arm. There’s also a stronger sense of character and story to this while presenting those familiar ideas, with them having a month’s worth of TV to set up Bryan not respecting Page an opponent and behaving the way he does as a result. Not that Bryan, being the greatest of all time, couldn’t get you to understand that immediately within the early stages of a match had they not had that, but it’s nice to have something like that with a little more flesh around it.

In general, the match is classic Bryan Danielson, only now performed with more confidence, more institutional support, and a more genuine feeling to it all.

The highlight of the entire match for Bryan isn’t working the ribs or working the cut. It’s not his bumping or the way he sets up Hanger for huge pops when he can do things like chop him or eventually hit the Buckshot Lariat.

It’s in the middle of a commercial break, when Page is being checked on by doctors for his cut, and Bryan Danielson has the time of his life with the crowd.

Jumping jacks and push ups at first to antagonize, before then playing with the reactions he draws and the smaller interactions with crowd members as a whole. Teasing the “YES” motion, only to stop short and give the finger in one of the greatest displays of a heel being withholding in wrestling history. My absolute favorite part was that eliciting a “FUCK YOU” chant, not rythmic in nature or anything and what feels like a genuine outpouring of anger, only for Bryan to pick up the speed on his jumping jacks to be in tune with the chant itself, only making it louder and more hostile.

Bryan Danielson is incredible here. A one of one performance in 2021, made all the more impressive by who he’s wrestling.

A friend of mine — someone whose fandom has largely fallen off since the mid 2010s, but who watched this and the big Bryan in AEW matches on hype alone — talked to me about this match a few hours after it happened, and said that it was like the old Bryan vs. Tyler Black matches, except if Tyler Black had a more human and welcoming and likeable sort of presence to them.

That probably isn’t totally fair to Adam Page, who is a good wrestler in the way Tyler wasn’t at that point (and if Page is a 1:1 of anyone, it feels more like what would happen if DDP never had the Diamond Cutter, but still improved like he did), but it’s not wrong.

His selling of the arm is far from bad or non-existent, but something about it doesn’t seem totally right. His cut’s insistence on closing up after a few minutes isn’t necessarily his fault, but it’s a weakness of the match that springs forth (or rather, that fails to) from his body and not Bryan’s. In general too, Hanger has the issue he always does, which is that he still doesn’t feel like a fully complete wrestler. A fun gimmick and good presence, but moreso a collection of pieces of offense. The sort of a guy who, as a wrestler, you describe through an expression of what moves he does more so than how he does them.

All the same, he has a certain quality to him that makes this fairly easy on Bryan, and makes something like this far more likely to succeed.

What works here from Page is less the offense and more the selling, carried forward less by anything he did mechanically, and moreso because everyone wanted to see him succeed. Like so many of the handpicked AEW acts, he doesn’t succeed because of technical brilliance or any one thing you can really point to mechanically (the least likeable babyface of them, Darby Allin, is naturally the exception here), but because there’s just something ABOUT HIM that works.

I want to see Adam Page win and succeed.

Every thing that happens in this match only solidifies that further. At no point here is Bryan Danielson admirable or cool, he never does anything I find myself wanting to applaud, and that’s in spite of him being the greatest of all time and one of my all-time favorites. People always used to talk up ROH Title run Bryan as “Flair-esque”, which never felt right, but in a recurring theme of that stuff vs. this match, it feels completely correct here. Completely convincing as the canon greatest wrestler of all time and best in the world, taking someone with a certain something, and gifting them something that packs as much of a punch as this does.

By the time Page finally reels off the Buckshot Lariat in the final minutes, after seeing it built up all match, something’s shifted. Nobody is ever wholly made as a top guy in one match, but at least in the arena and in this moment, Page comes a lot closer to feeling like one than he did an hour earlier.

Of course, it’s not a perfect match.

Hangman’s cut closes up and we’ll see in early 2022 how much more a real gusher can add to a classical title match like this. Some of the choices they make about placement aren’t ideal, and things like a big DVD nearfall feel like they happen too early, or something like a DDT on the concrete floor is reduced to being little more than another move when it should be a pretty big deal. Late in the match, when Bryan sells his hurt knee and Page his hurt arm, and they both sell after throwing kicks and clotheslines, it feels just a little over the top. Look at us, we’re selling, that sort of a thing. The way the match is constructed also, the majority of the pieces of this that feel necessary (Bryan’s shell game, blood, character work) come in at the start, with most of the less-than-necessary bits coming in the end, once everyone has largely figured out where this is going. There’s an energy lost somewhere around Bryan hurting his leg and Page’s table crash, which isn’t ever totally recaptured.

As with virtually every sixty minute draw, there comes a point when they have run out of things to do. I’ve yet to watch a single hour in wrestling where I thought to myself, “yes, all of that needed to happen”. Even the best ones. This is a match with forty to forty five minutes of great and near-essential work, and that’s pretty impressive. It’s also impressive that the stuff here that feels more like filler, like work on Bryan’s leg, works out as well as it does. Inessential, but never treated like it’s unimportant, and I think that’s an impressive distinction.

Flaws and all, it’s just such an incredible achievement.

An ultra-memorable piece of wrestling television, delivering one of the best matches of the year, but one that accomplishes something that feels real on top of that. Page is far stronger going out than he was coming in, the AEW World Title sees its first great match since Moxley/Kingston thirteen months prior, and Bryan Danielson puts the final stamp on one of the great comebacks ever.

Match of the Year is still just too strong given those flaws, but unquestionably in my mind, the home to the greatest performance in wrestling all year.

***1/2

Kenny Omega vs. Rey Fenix, AEW Dynamite ~ NEW YEAR’S SMASH NIGHT ONE (1/6/2021)

This was for Omega’s AEW World Title.

If you weren’t somehow aware, I’m not much of a fan of either of these men in 2021.

Both are guilty of a lot of the same things, and they’re things I dislike a whole lot in my pro wrestling. Overlong matches that often lose the plot entirely in pursuit of doing the most stuff, doing a lot of obviously choreographed things that are barely even cool. In general, these are two guys with a real talent for filling matches with things that should be jawdroppingly cool, but doing so much of them at every possible moment that they lose all that value and what should be awe-inspiring instead simply inspires an increasing need to just see a match end. Extraordinary physical talents paired with remarkably horrible brains. With Omega, there’s also the element of a good dumb guy wrestler thinking he’s actually very smart and trying to do smart guy matches, which is maybe the most frustrating thing in wrestling to me, I think.

It’s not totally fair to say this is a match free of all of those things, but it is a match where those impulses and excesses are reined in EXACTLY enough to be dazzling and thrilling. Given the trouble both men have had finding it, especially in AEW television matches, it’s hard to say it’s not a fine line to to walk, but it’s one that they walk especially well in this match.

Omega does power moves to the smaller guy and Fenix flies around to combat the advantage he doesn’t have, using distance as his friend more often than not. Eventually, he’s caught when Omega is able to close that distance, and loses very shortly thereafter.

While hardly a simple match, it is a match with a simple enough story and for once, one in which virtually everything relates back to this story. Fenix is always in search of distance, be it vertical or horizontal, and Omega is always trying to close the gap. The truly sensational things are spread out enough to really stand out, the pacing is largely very good, and a seventeen minute runtime means they don’t have quite enough time to get into any real match-ruining sort of trouble. A pure fireworks show, a sugar rush, all of those cliches, but with nothing that gets in the way of those ideas. Not a smart match, but also one that seems to rejoice in its stupidity while trying to tell you that it is actually brilliant.

I usually hate matches in this style and often matches involving these two in this style (one of the more baffling live wrestling experiences of my life was the All Out cage match, which very clearly sucked, even while just sitting there in the crowd), but this is one from 2021 that I actually did really like. A simpler sort of a thing, much closer to the ideal version of something. Matches like these can still be pretty great, as long as they have the integrity to admit what they are in front of the world, without any of that “yeah, but” bullshit.

For once, these two stumbled upon a little bit of that integrity.

***

Jon Moxley vs. Mr. Brodie Lee, AEW Double or Nothing (5/23/2020)

This was for Moxley’s AEW World Title.

The best match in the history of the AEW World Title. The only great match in the history of the AEW World Title.

It’s the natural evolution of their matches in EVOLVE and CZW a decade ago, in a way that their WWE matches were never able to be. I liked those matches well enough for what they were, talent always finds a way and all that, but almost every WWE “brawl” feels like a put on in a way that this didn’t and lacked a sense of proper chaos like this had. It isn’t WILD in the truest sense, it’s just a brawl that gets out of control and never falls back into it, but it’s so much fun. They get to use the surroundings too, but it never feels like they need the props to make the match good, so much as that they are going to fight everywhere and these wooden casino props are heavy, so they may as well use them to try and hurt each other too. It’s an extension of the match, rather than something tacked on to try and elevate it. The match itself is delightfully uncomplicated. They want to hurt each other, they hurt each other, and Moxley is slowly overwhelmed by the size and ferocity of his old foe’s attack, before being forced to do something extraordinary that changes the match.

The most refreshing thing about it is how Brodie Lee gets to feel important again for the first time in eight years. The character sucks, his Dark Order get up is absolute trash, but underneath it all, he’s still Brodie Lee. He’s the best big man of a generation and once again walks that tightrope perfectly between being a bully and doing a lot of really cool things on offense. Moxley is a presence and certainly carries his own weight, but it felt really really good to see Brodie unleashed for the first time in such a long time.

Following the big Paradigm Shift through the small Big Ramp, Brodie is about taken out, but they make a pair of decisions that help this a lot, and make a wonderful contrast to the mistakes of Cody vs. Archer earlier in the night. Similarly here, Moxley has to unload multiple version of his finish. Brodie kicks out at one following a Paradigm Shift in the ring, leading to Moxley now attacking the cut that’s opened up. A second lifting one leads to a two count. Instead of going two in a row, it’s now two different big kickouts that maybe people didn’t expect from Brodie, given how he’s been treated elsewhere for years. Is it a little excessive? Hey, yeah. Maybe. But it’s Brodie Lee, I’m not going to get mad an attempt to elevate Brodie Lee a little bit.

Instead of simply repeating himself until it’s boring, Moxley makes another far more interesting decision that both helps the match and helps out Brodie a little more, and he chokes him out for the win. Brodie gains a little something, and Mox loses nothing, because his defining feature has always been the sort of grit that makes something like this match and this finish work so well.

Not just a great goddamned fight, but a great goddamned fight where everybody comes out looking better.

***1/4

 

Chris Jericho vs. Cody, AEW Full Gear (11/9/2019)

This was for Jericho’s AEW World Title, with the added stipulation that if Cody didn’t win the title, he would never challenge for it again.

I’ll start this by saying that it’s probably the best Chris Jericho match in years. I got nothing out of his New Japan stuff or his last few WWE runs, so you have to go back to maybe 2012-13 to get another Jericho match this good. But this sure isn’t great, and he himself isn’t all that great in it. Cody isn’t all ther great in it either, so this succeeds solely through the things they try to do and the ideas they grasp at without ever really getting a hold on.

One of the most interesting things about AEW so far is the way Cody tries to do things. He has these older school ideas for his angles and matches but is a WWE System guy through and through. The idea is a match where a big shot and the blood loss suddenly shifting a match in a drastically different direction. Cody has decent ideas early on by trying to disable the right elbow used for the DEADLY Judas Effect, and while it’s not amazing, it’s something. I’ve seen so many aimless matches featuring both guys that I’m just happy to see them trying something, trying anything. Cody then tries the Big Ramp Dive a la his brother, the only good member of the family, but wipes out and takes a header, and starts bleeding. When done right (Joe/Punk III), it’s one of the most interesting ideas in wrestling to me. It’s not done all that well here. They make the move of having a doctor look at it clean him off. AEW’s strengths have come from it being a different and a little grimier and bloodier take on the WWE’s basic set up, but sanitizing it about ruins the story. Jericho never opens him back up, and they kind of redirect it to him working the right side of Cody’s body since that landed on the Big Ramp too. It’s fine. Cody doesn’t sell especially well, but he has decent enough comebacks.

They also get into the sorts of shortcuts that this match badly needs. Jake Hager interference, title belt shots, all of that. It’s not especially good, but the hot crowd helps a lot. It also helps that this is the one match the crowd actually seems invested in instead of the otherwise standard level of solely reacting to moves. They do a few big nearfalls too off of finisher kickouts, displaying Jericho finally learning some political knowledge by only giving Cody a Codebreaker kickout and never a Judas Effect kickout. This match is an attempted marriage between an old-school NWA idea and then a WWE style main event, and it’s ultimately not that successful. It’s a marriage that could have worked though, because we’ve seen it work before. The mistake is going any longer than like sixteen minutes with it, and with not getting a little more blood in the mix to really push it. There’s a lot of good bullshit in this that gets bogged down with the early stuff and then the back third or quarter or so. Jericho gets the Walls of Jericho on, which feels far less dramatic because the ribs haven’t been sold all that much, and MJF throws in the towel. I’ll be generous because they had a lot of good ideas, but the execution was shoddy in a number of ways. A step forward, but still not enough.

**3/4

After the match, MJF pleads for forgiveness and then turns on Cody. This was obviously going to happen from the first moment they began working together, but this didn’t quite feel like the time. Cody being Cody, I’m sure the feud will be full of good angles that get real over before the match underdelivers, but the angle didn’t hit me. Their relationship hasn’t been too big of a focus on TV or PPV, so it didn’t feel like a major disappointment. Ideally, Cody forgives MJF here and you hold it off after having a major beat here to establish that it’s an actual friendship on Cody’s end. Also would have been nice to have a little more room between two different Cody feuds based around a mediocre friend stabbing him in the back.

Real story here is Cody once again proving that he is nothing if not his father’s son, as almost nothing is more like Dusty Rhodes than doing a job to a hot heel except not REALLY doing it because it’s the semi main event and because the actual loss is questionable as hell and both the heel’s win and his own loss is covered up by a big angle. Any breakout singles guy that AEW may one day produce should be very careful around vehicles.