AEW 2022: The year of the bloody bunny

Satisfying Dynamite debut for Joe. I'm so glad to see him again.

It was pretty obvious from even the pre-show that the ROH show was being filmed/directed by the AEW crew. They’re not perfect but they generally have the hang of how to make wrestling look good on TV.

agreed. lord knows AEW has had its production issues and i didn't watch any ROH at all really in the 2010s so i'm completely bullshitting but surely ROH with AEW production is gonna be a step up.

it's important imo that they maintain largely separate crews with a bit of crossover / promotion of important ROH stuff on AEW tv. I get making the Joe / Lethal / Gresham[ /Bandido] a cross-promotional thing at this stage, both because it's important to try to convince AEW viewers to check out reborn ROH if you can and because clearly there are plans or wishes to use all of those guys on AEW tv. But once it's up and running they should try to maintain a bit of a Chinese wall imo.

v excited for Rampage - Mox vs Yuta feels like a pretty big stakes match. one thing AEW hasn't been great at for a bit is the jeopardy in these tv matches. they run lots of cool matches but you can see the winner coming a mile away. this is a star vs young talent match where it's a bit more up in the air. I still expect Mox to win but i think it's at least possible that Yuta steals an upset here and gets accepted into the Combat Club. such a great, simple angle.

Danielson / Moxley / Yuta vs Trent / Chuck / OC is a match i would watch

the hapless loser fantasy booker in me still wants Cesaro to join up to complete the Regal-adjacent triumvirate.

Yuta rules. That match was also incredible on second viewing.

mox/yuta is a classic

I'm so happy for Wheeler. He's going to be a star!

I’ve only seen the gif and not seen Rampage in full but HOLY FUCK GOOD FRIDAY EVERYBODY

wednesday was very frustrating, should've been a perfect dynamite but finale was inexplicable and the women's match was a fucking joke

i'm watching rampage this morning and it is FUCKING AWESOME. ruby & robyn renegade really rocked it. main event starting now

holy shit lol

Finale pretty explicable in a business context apparently but there’s no surer sign that youve gone too far down the rabbit hole as starting to care about that shit. Total fuckin trash, leave that shit in WWE where it belongs

Also I refuse to believe that if it becomes a commercial imperative to appeal to the south Asian subcontinent specifically you can’t find someone who moves better than this joker

I’ve still not seen it, is he really that bad? I’ve always had a soft spot for rubbish big guys though. I’ll take to my grave that they ruined Kurrgan by having Ken Shamrock be the first guy to take him off his feet.

He might not be quite in the same league as giant gonzales but it wasn’t an auspicious intro

It stuck out like a sore thumb. AEW has always been a kind of rebuttal to that vision of wrestling and I guess it should be celebrated that it’s taken this long for them to pull something like this but yeah - no thanks

I felt like the reveal was just...weird. It's funny, because the Japanese commentary that NJPW adds on (featuring Shingo Takagi) had the same reaction as I did when the lights went out. I had no idea who that guy was, so when the lights came back up, it didn't feel like "holy shi-!" but instead felt more like, "who is this?" I don't know if that's just because of my lack of sports knowledge, though.

In any case, Suzuki vs. Joe was great. What a weird cap to that.

Found time to watch Yuta-Mox. Holy shit.

Have they actually said what the Owen is going to be yet? I presume G1 style league type tournament, especially as they do knock out tournaments regularly already. Intrigued to see both sexes get a tournament too, it could really make some stars.

Also I’ve not seen Dynamite yet but god damn the news. It most probably would have happened earlier if not for covid, but dream matches are gonna be happening on ppv once a year if this goes well.

The background art for all the owen stuff has included a standard knockout bracket. A G1 style tournament, if you were to say organize it as 4 groups of 8, would be 112 matches long before the finals. Without an actual G1 style touring schedule, that would take roughly 75 years to get through assuming they want every match on TV. Never going to happen with a field that large.

Lmao yeah ok.

I guess I hope they maybe do an old school KotR type thing with wrestlers going many matches on one night (maybe quarters-final).

Just a minute into the FTR faceoff and it's constantly laughable at the kind of Usos/New Day/etc. tag-team level talent WWE allows to dip

not exactly sure what they're trying to do with sammy and tay but it's not working and it's inadvertently turned att into faces lol :( sammy's two big ladder spots were uh... painfully executed

otherwise perfect show last night :)

wardlow and archer looked so dope in the ring together that i hope they have a feud down the line

Sammy and Tay have turned themselves into the most revolting, despicable heels just by being themselves so I don’t blame AEW for trying to course correct. But yeah they’re dangerously close to “you suck, get the fuck off my tv” reactions at the moment.

Doesn’t help at all that Sammy / Scorpio is simply not an interesting direction for that belt when you’ve got all those other amazing wrestlers just hanging around

Similarly Scorpio / Kaz isn’t exactly a hot ticket.

Also bench the the Undisputed Elite guys for a bit please, they’re absolutely all over the show and none of them is better than “fine” at this point. Get the feeling TK dumped a lot of cash into the Adam Cole signing and wants to get his money’s worth but it’s way too much. AEW is so much better when it isn’t just 2010s indy / NXT guys everywhere

Show ruled, company rules, obviously

i love kor but i feel like his personality gets a little buried between cole and fish

KOR is easily my favorite of the whole group. Always thought it was talented, but he won me over huge at the first NXT Wargames. I've loved him ever since.

Was hyped on The women's trios tag match! Always happy to see Willow Nightingale on my screen, and happy to see Trish Adora on AEW! Though would have been happier with a different finish.

IN OTHER NEWS, WE PROUD:

WHEELER YUTA IS IN BOSJ 29!!@WheelerYuta pic.twitter.com/Kci2tKM5aG

— Ciarán (@CiaranRH93) May 1, 2022

i'm kind of immediately sold on the baddies section as a faction. they looked great

Agreed. Jade has big money huge star potential, and I've always loved Kiera Hogan from her time in IMPACT. Red Velvet fits so well with them, and I think the heel attitude suits her really well with how well she swaggers. I think it's really revitalized her.

FTR fighting each other was a lot of fun, but man I wish that it was a quarterfinal match or something. Wish it was for something more than just to qualify for the Owen Hart cup. Though it looked like they had some fun working against each other rather than as a tag team. It was easy to call who was going to win, but I didn't expect that sort of finish, though I guess it makes sense for how early this match was.

when you got a women’s division like riho and yuka in them, you can’t lose

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bIhwKDYOr8

i was at the long island show with maura, it was wonderful pretty much the whole way through except the crowd sucked ass (e.g. seconds after a nyla rose/emi sakura tag match started i heard someone behind me shout transphobic shit, anyone who shouts transphobic shit at nyla rose should get powerbombed through the earth; also during the ruby/riho match on rampage i heard someone dissing the entirety of joshi. can you imagine??? the total absence of taste??? on long island??? i guess you can)

very pleased to hear you enjoyed it for the most part, very sorry to hear there were people putting a downer on the experience.

it was objectively a good show and i thought the Hayter / Storm match in particular was excellent so idk if it's just a wider depression-induced malaise but i'm struggling to take as much pleasure in it atm as i used to.

I have been umming and ahhing but i think i might actually really fucking hate the presence of Adam Cole, ReDragon, Jeff Hardy, Tony Nese, Jay Lethal and (god forgive me) even kinda Samoa Joe. like if i wanted to watch a 2016 indy or NXT show I could just go and watch one. there are quite a few people who I enjoyed and who i would like to see more of who are getting no tv time because all these new guys keep coming in and shunting them out the picture, it's exhausting

enh maybe it is just depression-induced lack of interest in anything much, as i say. but it does feel like TK has been going way too far in his quest to assemble the perfect c.2014 wrestle-nerd's roster.

i wish he could find more use for Serena Deeb, Miro, Pac, Lance Archer / Jake the Snake, Jamie Hayter, the Butcher and the Blade, the Best Friends.

why the fuck am i watching another 20 minute Adam Cole match when neither Andrade nor Malakai Black are getting reliable tv time

totally projecting here but I am increasingly entertaining the thought that unfiltered TK has pretty shitty taste in wrestling i.e. loving all these completely tedious early 2010s indy dopes like the Undisputed Era, and that the best stuff which goes on in AEW is basically talent-driven, whether by Omega, Punk, MJF, Jericho, Danielson, Moxley, FTR, whoever

that's probably unfair but i'm feeling sour on it all tonight for some reason.

will be ponying up for DoN 22 regardless, of course. I think this Punk vs Hangman thing has legs

I kinda agree with you. And with the (possibly kayfabe) news that MJF wants out, hopefully it makes Tony have a reassessment of how he is using his roster.

That said, I’ve barely watched any wrestling in the past 6 weeks thanks to moving my whole life/work taking all my time, so I’m not the best for judging it. Still made time for hookhausen

i really do not agree with the last few posts lol

like how would mjf wanting out make tk think about anything? mjf gets tv time EVERY WEEK

would say he def can’t afford to keep the roster this big tho

I'm not at the 'get these gobshites off the television' stage but I see where you're coming from. AEW has a lot of moving pieces and I suppose it's only natural that TK would get distracted by a few at the expense of the others, but yeah they could mix it up a bit. They have a lot of time between PPVs and can afford to slow-build so you can swap people in and out of in-ring stuff while keeping the angles alive with backstage bits, video packages, etc.

checking out the card for tonight's Dynamite and i stand by my comments from last week. they're really focusing far too much on recent and recent-ish hires. i;m certainly not saying that they're at risk of running off talent or any of that stuff - i'm speaking purely in terms of my own enjoyment of the show.

and i don't mean to be a downer, i love the whole thing pretty much top to bottom and they still do almost everything so well. it's a miracle it even exists. just.. enough Adam Cole for a bit, please. AEW has always had the indy-to-end-all-indys vibe but recently it's veered too hard in a direction that doesnt interest me as a fan.

less NXT, Impact, ROH (or whatever) guys who have been around and wrestling each other for a decade. more joshi, more PAC, more Deeb, more Hayter, more Acclaimed. much more Miro. in fact if Miro is the joker tonight and we get him vs Joe all is forgiven.

excited for Takeshita tonight - that's a new hire that genuinely carries some intrigue

if the joker is Johnny Gargano i will explode with rage

I went to Miro's Twitter yesterday to see if he'd been tweeting much through his mysterious absence and he'd just retweeted something from Glenn Jacobs about keeping Knoxville "pro-business and pro-life" 🤮

ffs

ban all wrestlers from twitter.

except for CM Punk. "go suck a blood money-covered dick you fucking dork" is one for the ages

joker reveals were both huge surprises, no one i know guessed them both

only punk, danhausen, and nyla rose should have twitter

hangman vs. takeshita match of the year

i'm glad tony khan knew i wanted to see more konosuke takeshita

i appreciate that punk and hangman have yet to do a promo where they talk at each other. they've been building this up just with monologues and silent stares

i really loved this whole episode. perfectly-paced long promo between the bcc and the jas, just the right amount of surprise and dynamism added to the owen cup by the joker selections, astonishing deeb promo, and kor vs. fenix was nearly as good as hangman vs. takeshita

is the endgame of the men's owen kor vs. cole???? have to say that i actually am fascinated with the instability of the undisputed elite

Honestly, Brad, as much as I want Samoa Joe to take the whole thing, I would be very interested in your final two. Honestly, I've always liked KOR more, and felt like he's a much more complete performer, which almost everyone I know disagrees with, but he always looks good in the ring, and honestly, can always make his opponent look good, too.

I was definitely surprised by the Jokers, but not by the outcome of the matches.

Catching up with Dynamite. Great Hangman match. Serena’s promo got my excited. Lol at JE seem to be the third in the tag team match at a second pay per view in a row. Just a shame this Cole Hardy match is the “main event”.