Belgian_Waffle

I actually meant to also mention in response to people upset House of Black lost: Darby Allin desperately needs some big wins right now after such a rocky year. Putting him over Malakai will probably lead to a really good singles program (and hopefully, from there, to Darby and Yuta feuding over the All Atlantic belt once they get it off PAC). The jump cut to Death Triangle, the Best Friends, and Danhausen all standing around was so unintentionally funny. Like yes these seven ridiculous men are about to have a serious discussion. "Oh that'll be real productive. Which one do you want to talk to first, the one wearing the bumblebee suit or the one with the bone in his hair?". JR said some crazy stuff as well. I forget his exact phrasing but he said something to the effect that it was unusual for the challenger, rather than the champion, to have the hometown advantage, which I don't think can really be a thing. He also said "ironically, because he's using the flat of his foot, Moxley's kicks to the head aren't illegal". Is this really ironic??

I want footage of Melter's facial expression when Punk asks him to confirm what he's guilty of.

When they announced that tag title match on Dynamite my immediate thought was "the only way it will be any good is if the Acclaimed win". Turns out that the Acclaimed are *so great* the match stole the show even with the wrong guys winning. Too bad nobody called an audible. Keith Lee is good but it's time for Swerve to go. He's a talented dude but he just offers nothing that 15-20 guys on the roster don't already do better, and watching him go over guys like Starks and Bowens is a real drag. If I was booking this there's no way the Acclaimed don't win the belts in a rematch on Wednesday. Lee and Swerve have been lame duck champs from day one and their breakup has been telegraphed since before they even won the titles. Wish they'd hurry up and get it over with because a Lee vs Swerve singles feud to blow off the storyline doesn't sound any more interesting than, say, PAC vs Kip Sabian. Bowens' selling of his knee was the best selling anyone has done on earth since Kawada in the RWTL '93 finals. I never realized until tonight that the Acclaimed are the new Holy Demon Army and Max Castor is Taue, always trying to bail out his injury prone but absolutely driven partner. Lee and Swerve were Doc and Johnny Ace tonight except Johnny Ace circa AJPW was awesome and Swerve was whatever in this match. Was similarly baffled by Tony S. describing Starks as "looking like a future star" then 2 seconds later Starks got pinned with a spinebuster. I'm of a different opinion from what others have said on here re: how this match needed to be booked; Hobbs has been protected in tags with Starks typically dropping the falls. Starks also just lost to rookie Hook. He needed to win this and move on to something bigger right away. Hobbs still needs a year of feuding with more experienced guys before it's time to pull the trigger on him, and his size alone will maintain him as a viable challenger to most potential opponents.. Was Christian hurt or did they actually plan for this not to be the blowoff match? Was kind of stunned. Not stunned that Luchasaurus turned again, since it never made sense for him to have turned babyface again so quickly, but for Jungle Boy not to defy the odds and beat Christian here. Does anyone really think this feud can sustain another 3 months or whatever it is until Full Gear? Back to calling audibles: man it was a drag hearing how hard the crowd was behind Jaime Hayter while knowing she had zero chance of winning. Toni Storm is good but has tons of "attitude" and no personality. At least Baker didn't win. Back to AJPW: this show made me realize how gaslit I've been for the past 25 thanks to Baba's booking. When people would complain about Marufuji and KENTA being held back in Noah, I would always insist that this was how Kawada was booked, that it took a decade but was painstaking and beautiful and worth all the patience and disappointment along the way. Watching tonight, and watching the Acclaimed get fucked over and Starks get fucked over and Hayter get fucked over and Jungle Boy who I'm not even really invested in get fucked over (and HOLY FUCK would anything really be damaged if you made John Silver a star in one night by having him pin Kenny Omega in that trios match instead of him getting fucked over too??) and hearing the crowd reaction *clearly reflect that in all of the above five cases it was time to pull the trigger on these people*, it really hit home that, actually, all of my favourite Kawada matches are the tag matches where he wins and that the TC classic from 94 always feels kind of hollow and mean-spirited in the end when he loses. If all these people come out on top by Full Gear then I'll recognize that I'm just being impatient and shortsighted and maybe unrealistic, but if we're still seeing garbage decision-making like Jericho and Danielson fighting on ppv (instead of free tv, where this belonged) while Garcia isn't even on Zero Hour...then it feels like maybe some issues with austerity that we typically associate with WWE are threatening to creep into AEW. Edit: two things I forgot to mention; 1) Ace Steel showing up with Punk was so lame. Forget Swerve and Sabian, get Steel off tv asap. His presence is as irritatingly smug as it is uncomfortable amidst all the Punk/Cabana bullshit. 2) Call me crazy but I thought Cargill vs Athena was fuckin crazy good. Just hard-hitting and go go go. Thought they both acted like it was a big important fight for a title they both want.

Not sure if we're allowed to discuss the pre-show here before the whole event ends but

It worked at least once

Hard Agree with Dave: it was weird not to establish the injured foot as a key factor hurting Punk's chances of winning the rematch. He essentially ignores the foot injury completely during the second half of the promo, although I gotta assume him and Moxley will work/sell the foot a lot during the actual match. Hard Disagree with Dave (and Alvarez) Ace Steel deserving a raise. Maybe I just don't get romantic about the off-brand AJPW era of American Indie wrestling from the early aughts but Steel's appearance felt indulgent and corny. If we're going by the "he was there and being there is enough to be a name worth revitalizing" logic then maybe HOC should have had Kishin Kawabata or Richard Slinger come out to pump up Marufuji before his match with Kingston last Saturday.

After last night I guess there's a looming possibility that the Joker is Morrisey...

Hah, I mean... they're both slimey heel managers who wrestle sometimes. Sterling has high profile clientele while QT assembles all the sleazy jobbers. But essentially they're both there as punching bags/foils. I know QT is popular backstage as a trainer (and agent?) so maybe just keep him off tv if he's already found a role elsewhere. Personally I don't really get much out of either guy and they seem extra superfluous now that Stokely's there, although dueling heel manager factions sounds fun too.

I was gonna write this in the Dynamite thread but it's more relevant here. What do we think the chances are that in the Casino ladder match the Joker ends up being Spears just to throw everyone off and tease like there's no big surprise this time? Then MJF shows up during the main event, either to challenge the winner after the match or to cost Moxley the belt but then be like "Now you owe me, Punk" or something. I actually think Spears kind of sucks and would rather they just release him since they have enough scummy heels in this company as is, but it would be a good way to pay off him and MJF both having disappeared at the same time. Maybe even have him come out dressed like MJF as if he's kinda lost his mind from being MJF's stooge for so long, like when Kilmer dressed like Brando in Dr. Moreau.

QT Marshall and Smart Mark Sterling are too similar to one another to both be used as much as they are.

Not to continuously be like "this guy in wrestling reminds me of that guy from something else" but Andrade fawning over Ten tonight sounded just like the street toughs on Seinfeld admiring Kramer's armoire.

I meant to write this in one of my earlier comments but Moxley these days is definitely channeling Dice Clay at times right? I thought Dice was all over his opening promo tonight.

I was stunned they showed so many replays of it considering it was so dumb looking you couldn't even tell if it was a botch or just a really stupid spot.

I also thought Danielson vs Hager way overachieved after what I thought was an extremely boring Hager vs Claudio match. Big Jake vs Takeshita when Takeshita comes back??

Do we all agree for once that the show was really good? Nia Jax & Nia Jax aka Aussie Open scared me a bunch with how sloppy and inept they are (I thought they were legit going to kill Omega on that hideous double superplex) but they lost so I didn't even mind that much. Other than that I thought everything was pretty damn fun. PPV suddenly back on track, and with four whole days to spare!! Stuff that was funny/interesting/cool: - I could swear JR said "It's Tuesday night and you know what that means!!" at the beginning, right? - The two guys standing behind Punk during the end of his promo killed me. The one guy kept stoically nodding like he's Gedo calling plays, the other guy is cheering while wearing the t-shirt of Punk's IRL rival Hangman. - Britt Baker doing the clean ol' J.O.B. (even if it possibly means she's winning at the ppv, but maybe not). - As much as I agree that the roster is unwieldy at times, I actually thought having Big Cass come out and murder all the Wing Men was an effective way to establish that he's back to stay. Do we think they pulled the trigger on him because they see Hunter snapping up all the available talent? - On a final and more serious note, I thought Punk was tremendous tonight but if I were one of the ppl backstage pissed off about Cabana being fired I imagine it would just be salt in the wound to see Punk also procuring time on national television for his bro Ace Steel.

I never watched ROH back in the day, did Ace Steel used to be Don West?

Agreed 100% on all counts, with the most aggravating part being that you know if the Best Friends DO win he's never going to shut up about how it's such horribly conceived booking and makes no sense in the grand baroque superstructure of AEW storylines. While I'm complaining about Dave, at this point I think my desk job does less to batter and deaden my soul than listening to Meltzer aimlessly ramble on for ten or twenty minutes about ratings does. Hearing Alvarez's nasally little "take us through these ratings!" alone is enough to put me into a tailspin.

If I hadn't randomly noticed once while trolling Ben Shapiro supporters that Griff Garrison follows Ben Shapiro on Instagram I probably would have ended up with a Griff Garrison face tattoo.

Lmao wow Nash unnerved to find someone even more repulsive and unlikeable than he is.

Yeah it kind of baffles me how far some of the "pillars" have fallen in the past year. With Sammy I feel especially bad because I think he got really misused after the fans forced the heel turn on him and Melo and now he, and with him Scorpio Sky and the TNT title, are very much damaged goods. With Darby I don't know what the hell happened. A year ago he was facing CM Punk in Punk's first match back and then had that really great program with MJF. But since then he's mostly just been a guy on the roster. Tag matches, occasionally a big win but moreso big losses too. I don't know if the plan was for Jeff Hardy to put him over and then that obviously never happened so they just blanked on him or what but he should be getting his win back over O'Reilly *the very second* O'Reilly is back and then staying on a hot streak from there. Jungle Boy has been far more protected than Sammy or Darby but I'm concerned about where he goes after he beats Christian. He's still a pretty rotten promo and his nice guy energy in the ring hasn't translated well into his interview segments. Did anyone really want Jungle Boy to call Christian a "pussy", mock him for his divorce, and try to run him over with his car? It all felt too familiar, like stuff we'd see babyfaces do in the post-Austin era over and over, and what's more it kind of blurs the line between him and Christian if Jungle Boy's retaliation is just as volatile and crass as Christian's heel turn was. Jungle Boy isn't Moxley or even Hangman; his whole charm and the most idiosyncratic stuff about him was his wholesomeness. They need to tweak the character in a more fun loving, carefree direction going forward or else I'm afraid he's gonna just grow a beard, buynsome long tights, change his name to Jack Perry and become the umpteenth version of Omega/Cole/Hangman/Jay White/etc. I didn't really start feeling so negative about the status of the three dudes discussed above until I realized how quickly they're getting lapped by Wardlow, Wheeler, Garcia, and now Starks. And maybe that's just the way it's going to work out and that's okay. Nagata, Tenzan, Kojima and Nakanishi never did the business Tanahashi and Nakamura did, and maybe Sammy, Darby and maybe even Jungle Boy will end up in that solid, protected upper midcard role that Orange Cassidy and PAC seem to have eased into rather than being on the level of Moxley, Omega, Punk, Danielson and Jericho.

A) Is anybody else watching the HOG ppv tonight and 2) if so is this where we discuss it afterwards? Couldn't find much about it anywhere else on the boards. Thaaaaanks.

Yeah I keep thinking about how two of the best-structured (I would personally say THE two best-structured) rosters ever were almost bizarrely small: AJPW in the 90s and Battlarts throughout pretty much it's entire run and the reboot in 2009/10. Both only really featured the same 12 guys or so every week with some rotating guests and were (for awhile) able to protect just about everybody by consistently giving guys midcard wins. That said, obviously both of those companies had major issues about moving away from their top 2 or 3 guys as the years went on, but that's not inherently a problem with the roster size. I'm all for a small roster as long as the bottom rung is replete rock-solid if unspectacular workers like Tamon Honda and Masao Inoue and Ryuji Hijikata and Junji.com. AEW would have absolutely no issues with putting together a fantastic small midcard roster.

There's a few things thr agents need to address with him, mainly everything about his on-screen presence besides his actual wrestling. And even on that front, he was doing the same "keep bumping into the ropes and bouncing back to deliver more offense then get bounced back into the ropes, come hammering back again, rinse and repeat etc etc" finishing sequence with Moxley in the title match that he had just done with Fenix a few weeks earlier (and maybe he even did it with Joe in between and I'm just forgetting??). It was fun once but way too elaborate a sequence to recycle multiple times per month. To keep this on-topic and not just more slagging on a guy most people here enjoy, do we think the ppv would have been better served by opening with both the trios semi-finals and ending the show with the final? In spite of all my griping about the trios match on Wednesday, putting on the Elite vs Empire and DO vs BF as the first two matches and ending with the final would have undeniably been a hot as hell way to open and close the show, just action action action, and you would have kept up the suspense as to what the finals were going be right until the start of the ppv itself (and would allow people who really only like one or two of the four teams at least see their favs in a ppv match before getting eliminated). It also would have helped compel them to just do FTR vs MCMG as a straight tag and give Wardlow a singles TNT title match so that there aren't 4 trio's matches on one ppv. Obvious drawbacks would be the risk of someone/s killing themself/ves in the opener and then not being able to make it to the finals.