Jade Cargill finally lost the TBS Championship! Karen Jarrett got the biggest heel
pop of the night! And Takeshita just
turned heel on the Elite all because of that god damned carny piece of s-word Don Callis!
I’m Oli Davis, and welcome the AEW Double or Nothing 2023
review episode of the WrestleTalk News. Before I start, if you haven’t already,
hit an exploding superkick on that subscribe button and enable notifications to always on - as
I’ll have another episode coming up today with all the fall out from Double or Nothing. Who knows,
maybe there’s been another backstage fight over a muffin? Having notifications always on means
you’ll get notified when it’s live first. The buy-in pre-show match saw Hook teaming
with Matt and Jeff Hardy to take on Firm Legacy The Gunns and Ethan Page.
Unfortunately I just don’t like watching Jeff wrestle anymore. Moral issues aside,
he’s just not very good and looks like a shadow of his former self.
The final few minutes were fun, with Jeff landing all his Swanton weight on a double
Gunns cover, and Hook got the submission win. The main card began with everyone already
around the ring to start the opening Blackjack Battle Royal for Orange Cassidy’s International
Championship. The story being Orange has finished a man a week for over 20 weeks now. But can he
toss off 20 men in one night… like your mum? In classic AEW Battle Royal style, what are
the rules, what are the rules? As rather than the match starting once all twenty one men were
in the ring, which would’ve made it ridiculously crowded, most of the participants began brawling
outside the ring. Swerve was able to stand outside for practically half the match. Usually you’d
have everyone start in the ring, but just get out by going underneath the top rope.
Nevertheless, the action was super fun, with loads of great spots thanks to my new favourite show:
Brian Cage vs ALL THE LUCHADORS, but also because it furthered a bunch of under and midcard feuds.
Ricky Starks continued brawling with Jay White and Juice Robinson. Big Bill got to last until
the final three. And Swerve Strickland and Keith Lee exchanged a few spots in their storyline
that will never have an actual singles match. The final two was where the magic was, as Cassidy
and Swerve went immediately into a fast-paced, back and forth singles match. Swerve is so good,
I wouldn’t have minded him winning the belt here. But Orange managed to win again, doing a
low effort superkick on Swerve holding onto the rope with one hand to get rid
of him. This was very good. What wasn’t good, though,
was Chris Jericho vs Adam Cole, which we can count amongst AEW’s worst pay-per-view matches.
Sabu’s last minute, shoe-horned in addition made even less sense in the actual fight, the special
enforcer - that Jericho would’ve presumably had to have signed off on in their unsanctioned contract,
so it already has logic hole chair shots to the face - brawled with the J.A.S. immediately,
let’s say ‘falling with style’ off the top rope through a table outside. Him and Roderick Strong
somehow fought off all four of the J.A.S. members up the ramp, never to see them again.
They went a long 17 minutes, which also had a Britt Baker and Saraya run-in spot,
which ended with Cole hitting two Booms, one with a chain wrapped around his knee,
and the referee calling off the match because Cole wouldn’t stop punching Jericho in the face.
Yep, an unsanctioned match, the idea being it’s a feud so intense the company officials
will not endorse it, ended with company officials calling for the bell. It was a huge anticlimax,
and killed the crowd for the first 15 minutes of the following match.
And more depressingly, as this is a Jericho feud, strap in for another six months of the
same match. It was later announced we’d be getting Cole and Baker vs Jericho and Saraya
in an intergender tag. They’re going to need to do something special to get this feud back on track.
The best idea would be to get Jeff Jarrett to book it, as it was his trademark TNA
overbooking that came to the rescue next. FTR and Team TNA were wrestling a decent match,
but the crowd was a bit dead. Until Jarrett accidentally hit special
guest referee Mark Briscoe with a guitar - a tactic that was never going to work,
as Mark would’ve seen bits of guitar everywhere even if it did hit the intended target of Dax - so
Aubrey Edwards ran down instead - WHO GOT A GUITAR SMASHED IN HER HEAD BY KAREN JARRETT!
Even better, Karen Jarrett fell over after she did it.
Dear god, oh no… they’re definitely building to Aubrey vs Karen.
Karen got mega heat, making the final five minutes really lively - which FTR won,
embracing their buddy Mark after. It looks like FTR will enter Ricky
Starks’ Bullet Club Gooooooold feud next, as they saved him from another beatdown backstage.
Christian vs Wardlow for the TNT Championship was initially a more cerebral match than the
crazy high flipping or multi man ones we’ve gotten used to - which I really appreciated.
It was a lot of Christian cutting off Wardlow with counters or timing instead of big moves.
They were saved for the end. After a dodgy spot that saw the ladder turn
into aluminum foil when Wardlow jumped on it, we got to the real match: Luchasaurus vs Arn Anderson
- which saw Arn bite off Luchasaurus’ thumb! Wardlow then climbed the biggest ladder physics
will allow, and destroyed Luchasaurus with a Swanton Bomb through two tables below.
Arn then pushed Christian off another ladder perfectly into Wardlow’s arms
for a powerbomb, and Wardlow retained. As usual, a very impressive showing from Wardlow,
but he remains the person in all of this I’m least interested in. Give Arn the belt!
Presumably because of Jamie Hayter’s real arm injury, her women’s title defence against
Toni Storm was more of an angle than an actual match. The Outcasts beat her up before the bell,
for Britt Baker to make her second run-in save of the night, but in the end it wasn’t enough.
Toni won with a sudden anticlimactic finish. I don’t begrudge AEW here though. They did the
best they could with the situation, and Toni as the new Women’s Champion both gives the Outcasts
some much needed credibility, and it could ould build to Hayter winning it back in Wembley.
The Acclaimed and Daddy Ass entered the Open House challenge next, fighting House
of Black for the trios championships. But as funny as Max Caster rapping Buddy Matthews
is getting cucked by Dominic Mysterio was - as Buddy’s real-life girlfriend is Rhea
Ripley - he also said they don’t need to choose an extra rule for the stipulation.
I really want the Open House concept to get over, but I feel the opponent’s choice section
is getting consistently undermined - like when the Best Amigos forgot they had to do one. The
20 count and no rope breaks never really played into the story either, even though they had a
spot right there with Bowens selling his knee. The match was really fun, because of course it is,
but the overall feud, and Malakai’s stipulation, was very undercooked. This felt more like a trios
match with dark lighting, rather than unique rules being used to tell a different kind of story.
Daddy Ass got the hot tag to lose. I think this could’ve been left off the card.
Thankfully Jade Cargill’s feud with Taya Valkyrie has got her back to feeling big time again -
complete with fun TikTok dance routine entrance. Taya has been the most serious threat to
Cargirll’s reign ever, thanks to her being a far more credible wrestler than Jade’s
TBS division usually provides. I even bought into a title change at one point, with Jade’s
amazing late kickout off Taya’s Road to Valhalla. Cargill got the win with her version of the move,
though, prompting Mark Sterling to say Jade’s so good, she could wrestle another match. But
there’s nobody left in AEW’s Women’s division… apart from Britt, Shida,
Riho, Deeb, Soho… so they’ll just be leaving. Wait… one more thing…
As Kris Statlander made an awesome comeback, winning a short match and
becoming the new TBS champion - ending Jade’s 60 long undefeated streak.
Not a good weekend for long women’s title reigns that we were all bored of! But a great weekend
for finally shaking up those title scenes. In the first of the double main event - yeah,
that’s right, AEW are so minor league, they only have two main events - MJF defended
his World Championship against Jungle Boy, Sammy Guevarra and Darby Allin.
The match was already awesome from the entrances, with Darby playing a short film of him beating
up a Max stand in at an Elvis wedding, and Sammy announcing him and Tay are having a
baby with placards! I still don’t like him. The in-ring action itself was sublime. We
always talk about modern Triple Threats being so much better than old 3 ways - which were
mostly just singles matches with one guy peeking over the ring apron waiting for his
spot. What the four pillars did
here felt like a watershed moment for the Fatal Four-Way concept - where everyone is involved
in every single spot. A top rope Spanish Fly outside onto the two other guys, quad near falls,
all four men getting each other in holds like it was a Human Centipede of Submissions.
The layout of this match was admirably innovative, with four way spots I could
never even have imagined, let alone seen before. This was four hungry young guys
tearing up the artform and writing it anew. Most importantly, it had substance too, with
MJF winning after Darby accidentally struck the world championship during a Coffin Drop, letting
Max retain with a simple headlock takeover. The brilliance continued as Justin Roberts
announced ‘s-word is about to hit the fan’, because it’s time for the other
main event of Anarchy in the Arena. It was the same heady mix of insane
boundary pushing high spots and storyline substance we’d seen in the four way,
just instead of flips, it was bloody, bloody violence. All initially to a live soundtrack
of a band playing Wild Thing - a homage to the first Anarchy in the Arena, where they
kept Moxley’s music playing on the loudspeakers. It was absolutely nuts, living up to the anarchy
name. Claudio is piledriving Matt Jackson into a car, Mox is using a barbwire covered supersized
poker chip, referee Rick Knox is busted open. I still don’t know how that happened. Production cut
to split screens to keep track of everything. Just like how the fatal four way pushed the
boundaries of what that that stipulation should be, these 8 guys were inventing something totally
new, fusing the cinematic match of the pandemic with a live crowd experience.
My only pang of longing was… oh, Eddie Kingston would have loved to have been in this.
Matt Jackson hit an exploding superkick. Mox dropped Matt’s bare foot onto thumbtacks.
Kenny and Hangman fought out together like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
But ultimately that carny piece of s-word Don Callis played the decisive role - having
a heel turning Takeshita stop Kenny’s One Winged Angel, letting Wheeler Yuta get the pinfall win. A
great bit of proof that the Blackpool Combat Club elevate their young stars to be better than them,
no doubt a trait that influenced Takeshita. We now have a five person heel group. The
road is paved for Ibushi to join the Elite, culminating in this year’s Blood and Guts.
And absolutely incredible two matches and the Statlander angle to end what
was otherwise a below usual standards AEW pay-per-view. Double or Nothing 2023 is 93%.