10 men

2 teams

2 rings

1 steel cage

1 bloody affair

It's The Pinnacle against the Inner Circle!

The match 14 months in the making!

It's Weds night and you know what that means!!!

LMAO, Matt beating him with his shoe.

Got to love evil Nick is HBK.

They should keep The Elite all together through the next year, so we might see them in a future Blood And Guts match. They're the kind of them you want to see get the holy shit kicked out of them.

At this point, will Ogogo sneak in and body shot Cody?

Darby sure took a nasty spill.

Britt taking the title off Shida might be the most obvious thing in wrestling for years. Absolutely no suspense in that match whatsoever. 

Hey this is the first time I've seen the Acclaimed - they seem really good. That rap was hilarious.

Look at that cage. Look torturous.

Kenny is a surprisingly good promo actually - that was a lot of fun.

Can't wait for this match! Double cage looks sick.

Oh boy this is chaotic and awesome. Not everything is perfect but it's crazy how organic it feels compared to the NXT War Games matches which are clearly so precision planned.

AEW's has War Games done right.

EXPOSING THE PINE!!!

Yikes that's the second chairshot to the head...

Little bit strange how much Inner Circle is dominating - there's got to be some sort of swerve or turn here surely.

Wow.

Well they did a pretty terrible job of producing that making it really obvious he was landing on a nice soft crash pad. :lol:

First half of the match was awesome but it really slowed down when Jericho came in. All of the commercial breaks didn't help either - surely they could have organised with TNT to only have one interruption rather than three or four.

Crashpads or no, that still was quite the fall for a guy as old as Jericho.

The fall was fine - we absolutely don't want another Matt Hardy hitting his head on concrete incident - but you can't really ignore that it was another production error that soured a big AEW match. This obviously wasn't close to being as bad as Revolution but it certainly wasn't great.

There were a few factors in play here. I actually think the aftermath of Revolution magnified the spot here because it was another incident where the aftermath of the match failed to live up to the match itself. If that spot with Moxley and Kingston never happened I think most fans would be happy to hand wave how hokey the spot looked.

The other is that the match noticeably dipped when Jericho entered the ring. Guevara was having a night out and it was flowing nicely until they hit the reset switch and just had the Inner Circle squash the Pinnacle until that finish on top of the cage. It really felt disconnected from everything else.

Still with all that said, MJF got another huge victory and on paper they've handled his run pretty well so far. I don't think there's anything I would change about his run so far in the grand scheme of things.

A special Dynamite, huh? Let's watch.

Not sure how I feel about Kenny Omega becoming a full on chickenshit ringleader heel, right up to him sacrificing his minion Nakazawa multiple times. Feels so...WWE. This feud is so cold and it's going nowhere.

Cody vs QT was pretty good actually. Not a fan of this Ogogo gimmick. Wrestler are superhuman, in a sense. They can be punched in the head, dropped on their head, etc. multiple times without needing to go to the hospital or whatever. This guy strolls in, and with one body shot can kill literally anyone? Nah. Bit too dumb for me. If his one punch can take out anyone, he should be able to win the AEW Championship in seconds.

Pretty vicious beatdown on Darby, but the guy is literally invincible, so it's not like you can get a three count or whatever even after throwing him down some stairs. You could break both his arms and both his legs and he'd still beat you. Yeah, Darby Allin has jumped the shark for me.

I want to see more of Taz breaking down the specifics of a wrestling match. Love that little analysis of Christian's matches, even if it is all bullshit. It's fresh, interesting, and different.

Why does AEW have a fetish for multi-tag team matches? Kaz and Daniels literally challenged The Bucks last week, so the result is a foregone conclusion. SKIP.

So last week Hangman Page was the #1 ranked guy. They made a big deal of this when he lost to Brian Cage. This week Tony announces the two top contenders, PAC (#2) vs Orange Cassidy (#1). You're telling me that Hangman Page losing to Brian Cage dropped him to #3 or lower in the rankings? Well, Orange Cassidy beat Pentagon last week, so I can understand why he might leapfrog Hangman. But PAC? When was the last time he wrestled a singles match? He was gone for like a year, so he must have been near the bottom when he returned. He beat The Blade I think, a jobber, but besides that he's wrestled tag matches. How is he #2 in the rankings?

JUSTICE FOR HANGMAN PAGE.

Wrestlers overlooking Orange Cassidy is starting to become a cliché since the guy has beaten everyone he feuded with, including Chris Jericho. But at least Kenny found a fresh way to overlook Orange. Pretty good promo. Orange coming out and just standing there is weird, though. I don't get it.

Miro challenging Darby Allin, huh? I'm on board. Miro might be the only guy I can buy beating Mr. Invincible.

I'll watch the Blood and Guts and Gore and Death and Murder and Slaughter match later.

May 6, 2021 12:15:25 GMT NATH45 said:

This was advertised last week so if this guy didn't know about this it's his problem.

I just got done watching the match. It was an outstanding and exciting match. It kept peoples attention and never got boring. Also a lot of good spots. With that being said, it should've been shown on PPV and not free TV.

Agree with the majority on Blood and Guts.

First half was great, then got pretty lame once Jericho entered. Nothing particularly exciting happened. FTR spent 5 minutes deconstructing the ring only for it to be used against them in spots that didn't feel significant at all. Ditto with Spears and the turnbuckle. Was the deconstructed turnbuckle even used? I don't remember.

The way the match ended made everything in the ring feel insignificant. The whole second half of the match felt blah, and I kinda hate that trope of the heel saying "quit or I'll do it", then they quit and he does it anyway.

MJF was everyone's bitch the whole match, he's been presented as the "least hardcore" of everyone in the match, and he made dominating Jericho look so easy.

Definitely a match of two halves, and it ended on the worse half.

There's a clip out there somewhere showing Jericho landing on the ground but it is shot from above MJF's head and it looks way more real. You can't really tell the crash pad is there.

2nd hardcore match in a row with a goofy ass finish because of bad production.

Other than that I enjoyed it.

Now bring on BLUE JUSTICE.

That guy got to watch a PPV main event quality match live that most of us missed half of with PIP. Plus don't they tape Dark/Evolution on the same night?

How much are AEW tickets anyway? Weren't they advertising for like $20 the other day? I think he'll live.

May 6, 2021 13:13:25 GMT Emperor said:

I want to see more of Taz breaking down the specifics of a wrestling match. Love that little analysis of Christian's matches, even if it is all bullshit. It's fresh, interesting, and different.

Oh yeah I loved this little segment too. I don't know if Taz is still doing this on Dark but for a little while there he was analysing replays in a REAL SPORTS way - so it was fun to have a twist on that where he incorporated his heel character. Criticising Christian's "lack of explosion through the quads" on his frog splash really cracked me up.

So I haven't seen the show yet because was at work. But doing the time it was on I heard multiple txt notifications. I am sure most of us here who have been watching wrestling for a while have friends who quit watching over the years. Well the txt were from one such friend about AEW. I knew he knew of it by the Orange Cassidy reference he made when were playing SoR4 last year. I knew he watch TNT for other stuff so maybe they were promoting last night on other stuff there and he decided to watch.

Here are a few txts

"AEW is kinda excessive."
"They are a little unpolished."
"Every time they do moves I feel like someone is going to die"

"The cage match was horrible"
"Haha that platform Jericho fell on was made of Styrofoam and science fair poster board"

"What a sad wrestling to watch"
"I'll just watch attitude era matches on youtube"

"And they got JR doing that mess, wasting what ever is left of his broadcasting talent on AEW madness"

I assume that is what happen every time the numbers spike people give it a chance some big name is on it or something special only to be disappointed about not reminding them how wrestling use to be from either WCW or WWE from the 90s.

Watched it at my friend's casa last night, first AEW show I've watched in some time.

Mental notes:
- Most of us talked through a lot of the show. That's always bound to happen with 4 marks watching together but there was definitely some tuning out going on.

- Apparently The Young Bucks are "The Young Boogaloos" now.

- They're still doing tope's on every single show I see. Ffs.

- Odd choices in booking, could just be that I haven't watched in a while though; A Britt Baker squash match belongs on a regular episode of Dynamite imo.

- I love seeing heel Kenny.

- The cage match actually wasn't bad. Lots of spots I enjoyed from it, particularly the springboard (sunset flip? Shit, I'm getting rusty...) from one rung of the ropes to the other. Wardlow was money. But the finish and bad production completely ruined it for me. MJF's big moment here was spoiled by a cheap prop and Jericho smiling and then snapping right back into kayfabe for all to see. I can't be the only one who noticed it.

- I root for AEW, I really do. But that was honestly a bush league presentation. They can and do need to be better. I refuse to give WWE anymore of my money and would love to see them thrive like they should.

- I will say though: I highly respect the fact that I haven't been watching for a while but the MJF/Jericho arc has still been going strong. I don't feel like I've missed years worth of storylines that were condensed into bite sized WWE snacks or Big Show turned 6 times while I was gone. I do appreciate this dedication to long term booking, I just think the impact of it falls short when your production of it all is so damn cheap.

EDIT: And holy shit, Cody's blade job provided an awesome visual for once. Too bad that it was wasted on a guy who never. stops. doing. it.

God damn X-zero has a legion of wrestling friends. Look at all those text for just one show!

Well I do like it when teams look like teams. The white with gold and purple trim look really good. The Inner Circle prison uniforms were an odd choose but I guess to prevent Jericho body shaming from people who haven't seen him lately. The ending slowed down a lot but it was that bad. I see what people mean by the commercials. I felt I missed big chunks because sometimes split would just go away. For a match like try to get TNT to do commercial free if you want it on TV.

As for the ending maybe have the crash pad buried into the stage some so the AEW logo was flush with the stage. And instead of the shove maybe a this is sparda type of kick after he says thank you.

But all and all I didn't have a problem with the actual match.