CM Punk/Sting/Darby Allin/Hook vs. Jay White/Swerve Strickland/Brian Cage/Luchasaurus, AEW Collision ~ Fyter Fest (8/26/2023)

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The thing about AEW Collision is that I do not want to watch live professional wrestling on a Saturday.

Unless a show — and Collision has done this a whole lot, to its credit — can offer me up a match I believe will be great enough to watch as it happens (or in the case of the debut show, a moment), or as with the recent WWE switch to Saturday events, has a Rumble or WrestleMania type of must-see large event feeling to it, I will probably not tune in as it happens. My Saturdays, when I get off work, are for watching movies, or in the fall, college football also. I may watch some matches here and there between those things, but for the most part, I just don’t want to sit in front of the TV and waste even a little bit of my time like that.

So, at the time, I did not watch this.

The line up was not ideal, it was pre-taped, I knew I would already be watching a ton of AEW in the next week and change in between watching ALL IN the next day and having tickets to ALL OUT the weekend after. I watched APE (2012), K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER (2002), and KICKBOXER 4: THE AGGRESSOR (1994) instead. I regret very little.

However, I actually liked this.

It isn’t a great match, to be sure. Vegetables first.

The issues I always knew it would likely have, which is to say a Collision main event being at least five minutes longer than necessary and taking it a little easier before flying overseas to a gigantic stadium show and the weaknesses on the heel team in Cage and Luchasaurus lowering the ceiling significantly, are there and they do matter.

Everything else is simply very good.

By every definition, it is absolutely a house show ass main event. This match is interested in moving the chains as efficiently as possible, offering up simple and fun wrestling, and sending everyone home happy. There’s no shame in that, as long as we’re all honest, and this is a match that feels really honest about it.

In the same way that the first Collision main event felt a lot like 2004 ROH, in the way it combined a modern approach with an older-style mindset, this feels a whole lot like early 1990s WCW, and I fucking LOVE early 1990s WCW. This has a combination of tons of different characters, thrown together to air a day before a big event, a really colorful mix, easy formula, and a lot of fun fun fun combinations. Jay White vs. Darby Allin feels like the clear standout to me, in the sense that it could main event an AEW show tomorrow and likely be really great and feel like it belongs in that slot, but Hook vs. White and Swerve and Punk vs. Swerve are also a blast. Not every pairing in this is incredible, but even the ones with the less good wrestlers moves in and out pretty quickly, so nothing in this is ever TOO bad.

This is just good light hearted television pro wrestling.

You might be insane to call it great, but I am hard pressed to do much else but enjoy it.

Not the greatest match, but the most since the debut main event that AEW Collision has resembled something I truly love, and so I have to say that this was a really nice little piece of wrestling TV.

CM Punk/Darby Allin/Sting vs. MJF/FTR, AEW Dynamite (12/22/2021)

A match close to my heart, not only as a weird WCW nostalgia thing, but also in the fact that on paper, even a year earlier, this is entirely ridiculous and seems 100% fake.

When I was a teenager, and a little bit more in my early twenties (I have never known when to give up a hobby. I run a blog after all.), I used to love to fantasy book on wrestling message boards. A lot of it has aged very poorly (most, I would imagine), as does almost anything half-creative that a teenager tries to do. Sometimes it would be an in-present-day co-op fed with someone else, like the WWE in the late 2000s, in which my only goal was to get a John Cena vs. CM Punk main event for the title at WrestleMania, knowing already how good it would be.

Other times, and these are the fun ones, totally removed from any reality. WCW in the 2000s if it won the war, turning WCW Saturday Night into its own universe where our heroes The Dick Butchers (a team of Dick Togo and Necro Butcher) fought the villainous Lee Marshall Family (a team that — and I absolutely refuse to go check — included Super Dragon, Buff Bagwell, CIMA, The Backseat Boyz, and probably others) in a feud ending with Dick Togo throwing Lee Marshall out the airlock and into space, as I made the call to take the old THE MOTHASHIP call as literally as possible. That’s the sort of stuff I look back fondly on years later and talk about a few times a year with old friends who once shared the same hobby before growing out of it as an adult, as truly, it is very silly and a waste of time once you no longer have all of the time in the world to waste. That’s what TEW is for, you know?

This match is home to exactly the sort of fantasy booking nonsense — CM Punk teaming with Sting against a heel supergroup, with Sting and Punk both playing tribute to the other with face paint and gear, and the match getting twenty five minutes on free TV — that we loved and imagined at our wildest states. It is unbelievably bizarre and wildly awesome to see leak out into the real world like this, in the vein of much of the best AEW stuff.

It also rules in real life.

The action itself is as great as always.

Darby is a generational pinball and a match is again better for only asking him to cover mechanical elements. Sting and Punk are both great hot tags, changing a lot as they’ve aged, but never losing the energy that’s at the root of all of these things succeeding. MJF takes the best bump of his career near the end, even if it’s one taken entirely on accident. The real big takeaway from this though is how obviously excited Punk and FTR were to get to wrestle each other for the first time, having a lot of really cool ideas against each other and creating a perfect combination. The match itself isn’t anything new, given that the bulk of it is a rematch from that all-time fun Dynamite Grand Slam tag, but it was a joy to see it all expanded upon.

Sting, Darby, and FTR’s perfect marriage from three months earlier is only bolstered by the additions of both CM Punk and the Punk/MJF feud as a whole.

Punk is on the same page as FTR in terms of the stuff they all love, but miles ahead in terms of being able to work it into matches in more organic ways, and helps them take it a step further. MJF is the least of the six in this, but to be entirely fair, that’s by design. He’s a pest constantly, running and hiding from CM Punk, and only occasionally getting in the match when Sting and Darby are being worked over. He still occasionally sometimes comes off as someone playing an old-school heel rather than being one (a criticism one could fairly levy at FTR on occasion, but not to the level that it often is), but guys like Punk and Sting help him out so much in this regard, knowing all the little beats and rhythms he’s trying to hit and helping him get there with a little more accuracy and a lot more believability. They also have the time to really play around with all the different ways MJF can avoid Punk, from classic refusals to tag in, to being chased around the building, to the ways he would hide during the ending run. The great almost-payoff comes at the end, when Punk finally has him in his sights, only for his policeman Dax to shove him out of harm’s way and take the bullet instead.

Dax takes the GTS, falls a step back into the Scorpion Death Drop, before Darby hits the Coffin Drop last for the win.

Brothers in Paint celebrate in Greensboro once again, everyone leaves smiling real big.

Another of those classic chunks of pro wrestling that sometimes breaks loose from AEW.

***

FTR vs. Sting/Darby Allin, AEW Dynamite Grand Slam (9/22/2021)

Another one of these perfect little Sting and Darby tags, and outside of the cinematic, the best of the bunch. The match is an exceedingly good time in the way that all the Sting matches have been, but goes above and beyond even that.

In large part, that’s because instead of fighting a fun team that they can plug into some sort of a formula, they’re facing FTR.

This is not the blog for FTR/The Revival libel.

I’ll grant you that, like many others who seem to elude much of this criticism, they benefited significantly from the way NXT would allow people to practice matches before the big events. For the most part though, there’s been a very stupid backlash to them for a long time, as if being shoved into bad no-crowd 30:00 epics against Kenny/Hangman and then The Bucks, while having to acquiesce to that style of wrestling, was their fault and not just a bad idea in general (and one made worse by the terrible booking of both programs). Generally, you tend to get this from many of the dumbest people on the internet, but it’s the sort of thing that came to mind here. Some of the cosplay routines can get a bit lame, but for the most part, they’re still one of the best tag teams in the world. Everything that worked about them in NXT still works now. Adherents to all the classic routines, real clever about finding new ways to do things, great at everything mechanically, all of that. One of the little highlights of 2021 was them getting to show that again, even if they only got to do it in smaller doses as a jobber to the stars team, since they were almost definitely only ever hired to lose to The Young Bucks in the first place.

They’re perfect opponents for Sting and Darby.

It’s a match that calls for a tag team playing the hits, and nobody plays the old hits better than FTR. Awesome bumpers, great cut off spots, and yet again, they find fun new ways into old ideas. Every bit of offense or desperate cut off to Allin has some great little detail to it, like Dax going out of his way to get in front of Darby before pushing him back, or Cash reaching back to grab Allin’s hand while lifting him in the air, so that he couldn’t reach and tag Sting anyways. Given how unsympathetic Darby Allin is, it’s a major accomplishment that a control segment on him is as great as it is.

Darby, for his part, does everything he’s best at here. To be fair. That is to say, he dies a lot, lets Sting do the comeback, and then hits one super gross thing at the end. The match doesn’t ask me to cheer for him so much as it asks me to want to see Sting kick ass, and I want that in 2021 as much as I wanted it in 1998.

Sting kicks a ton of ass in this match.

Of all the AEW tags he’s had so far, Sting seems the most energetic and physical in this match, and it doesn’t feel particularly close. He’s never shown up to one of these and mailed it in, but in front of AEW’s biggest crowd and ever and with everyone in the match absolutely killing it, he seems to 100% feel some sort of extra motivation, and delivers his best performance of the year, which means it’s one of the best performances of the year period. It’s not just throwing hands and clotheslines and the signature, which given Sting’s age and condition, is more than fine. He’s sprinting around the ring here, he’s even coming off the top for an outstanding classic Sting style nearfall off of a crossbody to save a partner from a Piledriver.

The finish kicks a ton of ass too, as Sting dodges a set up chair spot in the corner to send Dax in, and goes into the Scorpion Deathlock. Cash tries to reach outside and pull him through, but something new interrupts the old playbook, as Allin crushes Cash with the Coffin Drop on the apron. Sting yanks his man back out, and that’s that. Our hero and his horrible son celebrate, everyone cheers, wrestling is the best.

One of the coolest matches of the year, which given what comprises one-quarter of it, is no small accomplishment.

***

Sting/Darby Allin vs. 2.0, AEW Dynamite (8/18/2021)

This was a No Disqualification match.

It’s not a long match, but it is one of the most entertaining and easily enjoyable matches of the entire year.

Crowd fighting, Darby Allin taking a number of real horrific bumps like getting hurled into hard surfaces (good for the soul) and double suplexed on the underside of his skateboard so his horrible little frame ricochets off the wheels and axels, and even Sting taking a table bump. Nevermind the true lunacy one experiences when one manages to square away that the damn Stever just took a double powerbomb through the apron from the tag team that, fourteen years and change prior, cut a promo about eating humble pie as if it was an actual flavor of pie that I and a couple of other friends online would spend years shouting lines from towards each other (HOW’S IT TASTE?).

Genuinely unfathomable, the sort of thing you would have mocked someone for drawing up in a TEW game even six months prior.

And yet, here we are.

Sting puts both members of 2.0 in the Scorpion Deathlock at once and gets the win.

Not all that long, but when you assemble one of the weirdest and purest expressions of joy in wrestling in such a long time, I’m inclined to let a whole lot of other stuff go.

It’s the sort of match and joyous little moment that makes up for pretty much every other annoying and upsetting thing that AEW does. Given that other side of the ledger, it speaks to just how god damned fun this was.

***

Sting/Darby Allin vs. Brian Cage/Ricky Starks, AEW Revolution (3/7/2021)

I wrote once about cinematic matches that this isn’t Letterboxd.

I have a place already to review movies, short or long (usually short), and this ain’t it.

That was meant dismissively, obviously. I like watching movies, I watched over 1,000 of them in 2021, but typically, they don’t mix especially well with wrestling. They might have in the past (hello to the Boiler Room Brawls), but in 2020 and 2021, it’s largely resulted in disaster. It’s not just a WWE problem, as the Britt Baker cinematic in 2020 and the second try at Stadium Stampede showed the problems with all matches like that. It’s a choice that rarely turns out well and rarely results in anything I want to see.

This match is the exception.

A dudes rock cinematic masterpiece on par with the best of them, complete with a problematic lead, the wrestling equivalent of a Tight Ninety (being under fifteen minutes), and some all-time fun stunts.

Loosely translated, pro wrestling’s LETHAL WEAPON.

***1/2 (you can’t rate movies with quarter stars)