It’s a spotfest Sunday with whipped spots, crushed spots, spot sauce and a cherry on spot, but when it’s all so beautifully timed and crisp like this you can’t help but just sit there with your mouth hanging open.
This list isn’t just going to be a list of Elite family spotfests, promise, but if flippy s**t is your bag, doesn’t really get much better than this.
Could have done without all the cuts to tag teams watching in the stands to be honest, although the crowd chanting those are fake at the Bucks’ Dior Jordans was hilarious.
There’s a bit of everything that you expect from the names involved, dickhead posturing from the Bucks, Rey Fenix doing ludicrous things like just swanton-ing over the top rope to the outside, walking tightropes, hitting thrust kicks mid-tightrope, another crazy dumb Canadian destroyer, PAC being a vicious weirdly strong Geordie beastie, the diabolical mask-based finish, it’s all here, tag team wrestling is the f**king best.
6. Kenny Omega vs Orange Cassidy vs PAC – Double or Nothing
Double or Nothing was a hell of a show.
We’ve already talked about the Sting match, but also the Stadium Stampede was fun, Hangman Page was over like rover and Jon Moxley & Eddie Kingston vs The Young Bucks was dangerously close to making this list. There is no-one cutting promos like Mox and Eddie right now.
But match of the night belonged to the AEW title, which was Omega’s first defence in front of a capacity crowd and it made all the difference in the world.
It’s one of the best triple threats in recent memory, everyone’s over and everyone’s working their arse off, especially and ironically Orange Cassidy who’s out here hitting double Hurricanranas and more superman punches than a litter of Roman Reigns.
It also features one of my favourite spots of the year with Omega just yeeting Pac into the corner.
Lots of amazing spots, most of which made the most of the triple threat stipulation, there’s genuinely too many fun moments to list them all, just go watch it.
5. Santana & Ortiz vs Best Friends – Dynamite
Parking Lot brawls used to be an excuse to take a whole bunch of shortcuts in a match.
A few spots here or there, but then the rest of the match is some sweaty dudes, grunting and walking each other around, like they’re escorting a drunk friend home, pausing to bash each other’s heads into stuff in an endless cycle of tedium, unrelated shot of Edge and Orton from Mania 36.
Not so this match, which is not only an UNBELIEVABLE amount of fun, but it has possibly the funniest closing moment in wrestling tv history.
That middle finger, man. Gold star Trent’s Mom.
It was just a day at the office where everything went right, all the spots worked, the sledgehammer lodging perfectly in the glass, the windscreen buckling perfectly under Trent after the dual powerbomb, Orange Cassidy emerging from the boot like slacker Gandalf riding in from the east at dawn.
Creatively violent, violently creative, no shortcuts taken.
4. Cody Rhodes vs Mr Brodie Lee – Dynamite
While one of AEW’s biggest assets is the variety of matches they produce, you could levy the criticism at them that their matches do have a bit of a samey structure.
WWE’s mode du jour of keeping everyone looking strong is very short matches with distraction/non-finishes, while AEW pulls all the way in the opposite direction, stuffing matches with arguably too many things to make their stars look good.
Thank Heavens then that they still have the nous to, every once in a while, book a match like this, an exhibition squash featuring the biggest star in the company having his dick ripped off by a brand new monster.
An unapologetic love letter to Antonio Inoki getting trampled by Vader in New Japan, the late, great Mr Brodie Lee demolishes Cody in one of the biggest wrestling shockers of the decade, single-handedly revitalising the TNT title, Brodie and the Dark Order all in one discus lariat.
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