John Pollock and Wai Ting review AEW Dynamite from Daily’s Place with Matt Hardy confronting Chris Jericho.
AEW’s second week in an empty arena setting saw some adjustments from week one.
The show built towards a confrontation between Matt Hardy and Chris Jericho, plus a AAA Mega Heavyweight title match between Kenny Omega and Sammy Guevara, an update on Nick Jackson, Brodie Lee’s first AEW match and his aversion to those that sneeze, Cody takes on Jimmy Havoc and joins Tony Schiavone on commentary for the show.
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As a genre, wrestling fails without fans. Even in last night’s Dynamite, the reflex of some of the wrestlers was to pose for fans… fans who are not there. And the Broken Matt character doesn’t work in a ring without fans, it just doesn’t. Broken Matt is fine for recorded and edited, scripted vignettes. But not in a ring against a headline act.
Maybe I’m different maybe someone can agree with me, but before I got the network i found alternative means to watch big wrestling shows. The quality of sound has never made a difference for me. I’ve watched shows thought a match was good to Great like AJ/Aleister Black at Elimination Chamber heard John review it and say the crowd was dead and say to myself “I didn’t even notice”. During these trying times where I’m locked in the house I appreciate the effort both companies are putting up and I will grade on the ultimate curve as we fail to flatten the real one and give a big thank you for the 4 hours of entertainment from both shows trying to pull off something very difficult
On the TNT airing of last night’s show, there was a delay in getting to the ad break during the Allin-Sabian match, so we were able to hear some of the ring drape discussion. Cody said he handled the selection, while Tony thought that would have been Brandi’s doing.
It’s a bit strange having no crowd… but I still enjoyed this show.
I’m more into singles matches than tag matches, so really appreciated the opporunity for a bit more of this.
Darby vs Kip was good.
Kenny vs Sammy was excellent, I’d really like to see that match up again.
Awesome to see the mega championship defended on Dynamite. It’s a great dynamic that AEW can have this kind of relationship with other promotions. I hope they can continue to do this.
I’m not that excited by these former WWE guys, though.
Lance Archer and Jeff Cobb are more interesting than Matt Hardy and Luke Harper / Brodie Lee. Willing to give it a chance to see how it plays out though…
I was thinking about this with the Brodie Lee roll-out. One of the major disadvantages that WWE has faced for years is that it’s very rare that another company can “make” a star for them. Beyond the 10-15 obvious guys (i.e. Omega, Bucks, a few Japanese talents - but even then I’m not sure), there are very few workers who could show up on Raw and have that instant buzz from the mainstream WWE audience. Meanwhile, AEW can (wisely) grab a WWE midcarder like Luke Harper and credibly portray him as a major player right away.
Obviously, there’s more to it than that (see: Shawn Spears) and WWE has done themselves no favors by how they’ve handled guys like Harper, Neville, etc. But AEW seems to be pretty good at capitalizing thus far and it reminds me of one of the major pitfalls of late-era WCW: giving a platform to guys like Jericho, Guerrero and Benoit to get over and then letting them go somewhere that will use them properly.