I decided to wait a little bit before putting my 10 thoughts on this show up, as we had the far better live reports from Harrak and Howard which deserve to get the attention. But, as I am old and have no life, I still watched the show and I still decided to write about it.
First, the name. Yes, the Fyre Festival is something that happened and to those of us with a fine sense of the absurd, it was freakin’ hilarious. However, this name will be bizarre in 5 years and the mannequin jokes and the rest will make no sense except to those who have pop culture memories longer than the attention span of a goldfish with Alzheimer’s. Just sayin’.
Anyway, here’s ten thoughts on the second AEW show I’ve seen after Double Or Nothing. Apparently, they’ve had three – does anyone know where I can see the first show? I don’t even know what it is or when it was. Sorry, but Australia is a nasty little Fascist theocracy at the arse end of the world and I’m lucky I even knew what this AEW thing was in the first place…
Okay, enough of my bullsh*t – here’s 10 thoughts!
1) The buy-in started with the first match at 2 ½ minutes in! Private Party v SoCal Uncensored v Best Friends was a 3-way tag team match-up… and what a way to start the show! This was not an all-in spot-fest, but a good match to start with some nice looking spots. Quen might just have the best looking SSP I have seen. That rana into a cutter double team move! Holy crap! Best friends win with a strong zero after a little over quarter of an hour. Great opener!
2) I said in my Double Or Nothing 10 Thoughts that the librarian gimmick sucks. Well, Leva Bates as a wrestler also sucks. Allie tried hard, and looks like she has the goods. Well, based on this match, the WWE is still ahead in its female wrestlers (though with Lacey Evans and Alexa Bliss, you have to wonder). Bleh. Allie won after about 8 minutes.
3) Apparently this person named Alex Jebailey is the organiser of the gaming convention happening at the same time, and so he was put into a hardcore match against Michael Nakazawa. After 10 minutes or so of what I guess was a version of a “celebrity” match, Nakazawa won with a fluke pin. Okay, kudos to Jebailey for doing it and taking some nice bumps and shots, but… Hey! The crowd liked it. I thought it was rubbish… but better than the match it followed.
[3a) The Buy-in started so well, and finished so badly. Not a good way to start.
But then the main show started with a frankly awesome video package!]
4) First match of the main show saw Christopher Daniels battle Cima. This was not a high-flying spot-fest, but a good ol’ fashioned wrestling match with solid moves being hit. Sure, there was some flying, but it was more about making the moves hit and hit hard. A good match, maybe not so much for the fans of spotfests, but I really enjoyed it. After about 10 minutes, Cima picked up the pin with a meteora that looked like it connected with all his weight, giving him momentum going into a fight with Kenny Omega at the next show.
5) Riho v Nyla Rose v Yuka Sakazaki was okay. Okay. There were some great moves and some hard hitting, but there were also some awkward spots and some laziness. It was watchable, but nothing great. Having said that, Rose’s top rope guillotine on a draped Riho was pretty damn impressive. Riho won after almost fifteen minutes by cradling Rose. I will also say, I do like the female ref officiating female matches.
6) MJF v Jungle Boy v Jimmy Havoc v Hangman Adam Page was a good match. It was not a high-flying spotfest and, much like Daniels-Cima, relied on wrestling to entertain the crowd and get the job done. And that they did. 10 minutes of fast-paced wrestling. It didn’t become just a series of one-on-one matches ( though that did certainly happen at times) because there was always some-one there to make sure that it was changed up. Ending came with Page pinning Havoc while the other two were outside. Cool match. And the Page/MJF feud looks set to be a good one.
7) This was Cody showing the WWE just what they have let go. Why didn’t the WWE let this Cody have a go on the main stage? Morons. Sorry. Let’s start again…
Cody Rhodes v Darby Allin went to a 20-minute time limit draw and it would not have been out of place in a late 1980s, early 1990s NWA(WCW) show. This was 20 minutes of wrestling. There were a few rest-holds, but not that many. The pace was deliberate, sure, but it was a good match. And, more than that, the crowd was into it. They were into what was a wrestling match! They didn’t need the 400 flips or the overdone false finishes – they got in-ring action and they loved it. There were a number of highlights, but Allin is insane – missing a coffin drop to hit the ring apron was, well, stupid! And Cody sold the hand injury all through the second half of the match. Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, but I damn well enjoyed it.
The post-match chair shot to draw blood on the back of Cody Rhodes’ head… was this what we wanted? But sh*t a brick, what a way to end the match and ensure there was no overtime…
8) The Laredo Kid, Pentagon Jr & Rey Fenix v The Young Bucks & Kenny Omega was a gymnastics display. I do enjoy me a bit of this style of wrestling and what awesome booking – this is the only match of this style on the card! The crowd isn’t jaded into seeing more and more flips and matches aren’t designed to out-perform one another – if it’s the only one on the card, they stand out for that reason and no-one else has to compete with them. There were too many spots to call properly. It was insane. The start when the Elite all came out dressed as characters from Street Fighter (Akuma, Ryu & Ken) was amazing. “Round 1 – fight!” Brilliant! Yes, I loved this match. My favourite match of the night, and I don’t care what anyone else says. No story-telling, minimal selling, but so much fun. So sue me. And, after 20 minutes that hardly felt that long at all, Kenny Omega pinned the Laredo Kid for the win for the Elite.
9) This is apparently a non-sanctioned match, Jon Moxley v Joey Janela. It was basically an extreme match – halfway between the hardcore matches of early 2000s WWE and truly insane ECW/CZW. This was just violence for violence sake, and it was, again, something different to everything else on the card. Barbed wire, tables, tables with barbed wire, chairs, chairs with barbed wire… you get the idea. This goes for 20 minutes and it was really just spot after spot, but isn’t that what this sort of match really is? There is blood – not as much as Dustin at DoN, but some – and there is a lot of pain. In the end, Moxley hits a move (the Paradigm Shift) onto thumb tacks to pin Janela. The crowd’s chant of, “You sick f*ck!” was deserved, by the way.
10) Post-match Kenny Omega comes out and gets revenge for Double Or Nothing by beating the snot out of Moxley through the arena to the stage, giving the crowd even more violence, leaving Moxley lying helpless on the stage while Omega stands tall. But Moxley smiles and it’s creepy, and the match these two is going to eventually have (at All Out, I believe) should be off the freakin’ charts.
So… the show. Not as good as Double Or Nothing, I will say that from the outset. Better than any WWE show this year, I will also say that. A great show, let down by a huge chunk of the pre-show and yet only one match on the main show did not resonate. This is another show worth catching. 2 AEW shows, two absolute corkers (I’m Australian – deal with it). I am loving AEW.
And that’s how I saw Fyter Fest 2019.
