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AEW DYNAMITE JUNE 26, 2024
OPPONENTS FORCED TO TEAM
When you steal one bad lazy booking trope from the worst years of WWE, why not do it twice on the one show?
Let’s start with the women’s world title competitors. The match was good, it went pretty much exactly how these sort of matches always go with people not wanting to tag each other and all the rest of it. The whole point of this was to end up with Mina Shirakawa accidentally laying out Mariah May. But how they got there made very little sense. Why was the babyface Mina trying to hit Toni Storm from behind? Why didn’t something happen to force Mina to want to act in that way? It was a good idea, badly executed. However, it did add some intensity to the situation with Toni now pissed off at Mina ahead of their title match on Sunday.
The men’s world title situation also played out exactly like every single “opponents being forced to team” match has played out in the past. Will Ospreay & Swerve Strickland obviously got the win. The post match was good. Swerve delivered on his promise of dropping Ospreay if he touched his title again, which made Swerve look like a guy that isn’t to be messed with. Ospreay got too arrogant and it backfired. There is intrigue as to how this match plays out on Sunday as you can see it going either way.
GARCIA HOMECOMING
AEW are making a huge effort to rehabilitate Daniel Garcia after the “Jericho vortex” sucked away any momentum he once had. Garcia got a great reaction in his homeland, as did MJF, so this felt like a hot start to the show with a lively crowd. Garcia cut the best promo of his career and did a lot in giving people a reason to care about him. The interaction with MJF felt somewhat out of place, and MJF came off quite insincere with some of his promo. Was that the point? I’m not sure. Why he challenged Garcia to a Wembley match, I have no idea. That obviously does not feel anywhere close to a stadium worthy match as of now. Maybe it was just said in order for Will Ospreay to upstage MJF, to build to what might actually by MJF’s Wembley match. With all of this effort to build Garcia, he really has to beat Ospreay next week, or else what was the point? Fans have been teased with Garcia pushes many times before. If he fails again, the audience will lose faith in him. And Ospreay does not need the International title. There was no attempt whatsoever to create any interest in MJF vs Hechicero at Forbidden Door. Quite the opposite in fact, with MJF pretty much burying Hechicero, much like he buried the FD concept in his return promo. Why would I have any reason to care about that match on PPV?
ELITE MALAISE
I enjoyed the first hour of Dynamite. The Elite had not entered by head once, so when they popped up on screen at the one hour mark, I audibly groaned. Maybe that was the point? But I came very close to fast forwarding through what they had to say. What they did say wasn’t particularly good yet again. Max Caster’s promo wasn’t much better. Do we really need to hear “Young Cucks”? 1999 was 15 years ago. Anthony Bowens promo WAS really good, as was the reveal of Hiroshi Tanahashi as the partner of The Acclaimed on Sunday. It is a great idea to put Tanahashi in the ring with Okada given their amazing history together. I want to see how “Scissor Ace” interacts with a much different version of Okada than was last in the ring with him this past February. This is a nice match for the PPV.
A DEAD CONCEPT
Forbidden Door is a dead concept, and for many reasons. Three years ago it was a fresh and exciting possibility to see the stars of AEW & NJPW in the ring together for the first time. Three years later, NJPW is an ice cold promotion with nowhere near as much fan interest in the Western world as it once had, and very few headline stars left to create the dream matches that the FD concept relies on. Most of NJPW’s stars now wrestle for AEW, others are ageing out and many we have seen time and time again in AEW. It’s not special or shocking to see Tanahashi or Naito in an AEW ring. We randomly see NJPW and CMLL names pop up in AEW throughout the year, so why would anyone be encouraged to buy a PPV based around the idea of this being a one off “world collide” type situation. The regular AEW audience also simply either do not know who a lot of people are or have very little interest in them.
Tetsuya Naito is NJPW’s biggest star in Japan. He got very little reaction when his music hit on Dynamite and had a very unmemorable and heatless brawl with Jon Moxley, to build an IWGP title match that feels like one of the lesser important matches of the PPV card. I am very much looking forward to Bryan Danielson vs Shingo Takagi. That feels like a proper dream match in the spirit of Forbidden Door between two of the greatest in-ring wrestlers of their generation.
Zack Sabre Jr & Kyle O’Reilly wrestled a really good technical match that played out to near silence. The angle that followed was the annual “What in the f**k is going on” blur of random names jumping in the ring as Excalibur screams some context at you. Gabe Kidd was hanging around with Roddy Strong for some reason. Tomohiro Ishii saved Orange Cassidy, who has a very loose connection to Orange that even the most die hard AEW fan has probably forgotten about. We had TMDK members in the ring. I am a hardcore NJPW follower and even I was struggling to understand what was happening here or what the point of this was.
Minoru Suzuki appeared on the screen to very little response, again because we have seen him in AEW numerous times. Apparently he is challenging Chris Jericho to a match at the PPV, in a segment that was poorly explained. Why did they set up a six man tag on Collision only to change it here? Jericho’s promo content and delivery was god awful once again. Suzuki vs Jericho could be very entertaining on the PPV though, because Suzuki is still a master of his craft.
Forbidden Door always delivers on the night, but as is tradition, the build has been clunky and messy. This year more than ever with the concept feeling like it really serves no purpose and is just another PPV on the calendar.
I can be reached at matthewmacklin90@gmail.com.
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