Some Full Gear 2021

This was one of only two PPVs I checked out in any capacity last year. My interest in American wrestling was as low as it had ever been, between starting a new job and doing a PhD I barely had time to watch stuff I did have interest in, and for the first time since maybe the year 2000 I didn't even bother watching Wrestlemania within a couple days of it happening. I didn't watch everything on this show, or if I did then I didn't pay attention to everything. I think I had the Adam Cole thing on as background noise while I dicked about with Excel formulas. I knew nothing about the context of any match and I'm pretty sure I hadn't even realised Rusev and Miro were one and the same until I saw this. I was mostly interested in four matches -- Darby/MJF because I liked Darby, Danielson/Miro because I liked Danielson, Punk/Kingston because surely that had to be good, and Page/Omega because Page has great entrance music and he was cutting about on a horse for a minute there. I liked all four to varying degrees, or at least liked that Page won the belt in the main event, and I'll watch three of the four matches again. I'd be shocked if they all don't land a little better this time as well.

Darby Allin v MJF

I thought this was great the first time and even better on a re-watch. There were a couple things I could've maybe done without and I guess they could've shaved off a few minutes, but as a whole they knocked this bastard out the park. My gripes with it aren't even major ones, really. More than anything else they took me out of it a bit when they went back to the roll-ups and trading inside cradles during the finishing run. It felt like Flair doing a headlock takeover as a setup to the bridge-into-backslide bit that he'd usually do late in matches, I guess because it was a thing he liked to do so why not. It's jarring and always feels out of place. On the other hand they at least had an excuse to go to the headlock in the first place, as half the story coming in was that MJF was adamant he could beat Darby outright with a headlock takeover. Still, it didn't last very long and they reeled me back in pretty quickly. It was more Savage v Steamboat than Flair v Terry Taylor. Prolly. The second thing isn't even much of a gripe to be honest, and I could probably convince myself that I actively liked it. If one half of the story was built around MJF wanting to beat Darby with a headlock, the other half was built around him throwing shit at Darby's dead uncle. They leaned more into the former than the latter, so they started with an extended chain wrestling sequence and not Darby trying to stab Friedman in the face with a chisel, which would've been my personal preference. Either way it started with an MFJ headlock takeover, so you have your narrative consistency and all that, but what really grabbed me was the thing that'll usually have the opposite effect. The headlock led into an extended parity exchange, and by extended I mean probably the longest one that I've seen. I don't even like Dean Malenko/Eddie Guerrero exchanges when fucking Eddie Guerrero is doing them so most other people have no shot, but I'll be damned if this wasn't the apex of Malenko/Guerrero indie parity stalemates. They hit everything clean as a whistle and the degree of difficulty on some stuff was fairly high, and hey, if you're Darby and some schmuck is saying he could beat you with a headlock then why not go and prove him wrong straight out the gate? Darby Allin can WRESTLE. Storytelling! Everything else was tremendous. Straight after the opening exchange MJF cracks Darby with a sucker punch, then takes it to the floor and we get one of the top drawer Darby Allin topes. Darby's tope is great for a few reasons and one of them is how it requires less setup than most. He just hits it quicker, so the recipient has to spend less time standing there waiting for it. This one had the recipient adding his own spin, as MJF started jawing with a fat boy in the crowd and never even saw it coming. Of course Darby crushed him dead with it too. Darby was out of his mind and the missed Coffin Drop on the apron pretty much writes its own story after that, but MJF's work on the back was inspired. Some of those backbreakers were perfect and the powerbomb on the knee was an absurdity of a thing. That's a spot that doesn't look good all that often, but Darby is a maniac and this looked like something that would paralyze you. As soon as it happens MJF sells his own knee, and it makes sense because obviously a move like that is a double-edged sword. I thought everything around that knee from there on out ruled. He sold it great in that each time he used it as part of an offensive move or Darby chop blocked it, the longer it took for him to recover. He wasn't hobbling around on one leg right away, it was still functional to begin with but by the end he was having to drag himself back to one foot with the ring ropes. All the huge bumps towards the end looked great - the tombstone on the apron (where MJF sold the knee again), the Coffin Drop on the floor, the crazy Hijo del Santo powerbomb thing, everything getting major reactions. I thought the finish with the skateboard had just the right amount of theatre without being stupid and in the end MJF did what he said he'd do; he just needed some Memphis courage to get him over the line. Really an awesome match, and up there as one of the best PPV openers you'll get. 

Bryan Danielson v Miro 

I liked this way more second time around. Watching it in November I was actually a wee bit disappointed, as it was the first time I'd checked out Danielson in AEW and I no idea what Miro was supposed to be. Context helps, shockingly enough. This is the first time in his AEW run that Danielson has been shut down with such relative ease. Miro would absorb shots and literally chuck him across the ring and Danielson's persistence didn't seem to matter. Miro had the engine so you couldn't even see Danielson adopting the Morishima strategy. It was a really fun Miro performance and I guess this is about the highest I've ever been on him. Presumably he was legit injured here (has he made an appearance since?) because Danielson never went after the bandaged up leg, though he did try and chip away at the other leg even if it never got much traction. By the end it felt like Danielson was just trying to survive in the hopes that his ridiculous skill could carve out an advantage, and I obviously loved Miro doing an Ultimate Warrior and asking his gods for guidance when Danielson escaped the Game Over. I even enjoyed Miro raising his arms like a big old grizzly bear and telling Danielson to kick him. That stuff is usually bull pucky but this reminded me of one of your big Dutch judokas coming into RINGS and telling Maeda to stop hitting like a child. Miro's history of neck problems is documented enough that eating an ugly DDT from the top rope was a plausible death shot, and after that it's hard to shake a guy who has you locked in a guillotine when you've lost feeling in your arms and legs. 

CM Punk v Eddie Kingston 

Phenomenal on first watch, more phenomenal on second watch. It's another one that lands even better after seeing the build up (which was short, but that in-ring segment was incredible and they really didn't need a whole lot more after that). This was basically a street fight from the jump, but not a pro wrestling street fight with your kendo sticks and ladders; a street fight between two guys who want to punch a hole in the other's face, which is really the best kind of street fight, the kind that spills from a bar or a supermarket or boxing gym into the middle of the road. Eddie walloping Punk with the back fist as Remsburg tries to separate them was an amazing way to start it, and Punk's lights on but nobody's home selling was spectacular. When he flips Eddie the bird before even standing back up you have a pretty good idea of what this is going to be like. I thought both guys were tremendous, for similar reasons in the broad strokes sense - selling, timing, all of that - but also for how they took pretty different character paths as the match went along. This might've been the first time Punk got audibly booed since coming into AEW, and I guess it's a look at how things might go whenever the Page feud really picks up. Both of them were babyfaces and Kingston has about as much of a die hard following as Punk at this point, but even if Punk expected the crowd to be split going in he obviously rolled with some of the punches here. It was noticeable in his other matches as well, where he was clearly going with the flow and tapping into what the crowd were after. In the Sydal match it was playing up the body slam, and there was no way he could've expected that crowd to be rabid enough for a fucking body slam that he planned it beforehand. It was improv and it was brilliant. When he jumped on a near-lifeless Kingston and started clubbing him about the head I don't think he expected the crowd to side so completely with Eddie, especially considering they never showed much displeasure earlier when Kingston was trying to rip Punk's ear off or bite a chunk out his head. That moment in particular didn't seem to precipitate a change in Punk weather vane, because there were points earlier where he leaned into the idea that he wasn't the hero in this tale, but if nothing else it was a culmination of things. Those things being the tease of the five-knuckle shuffle, the pause and grin as he acknowledged the boos while blood streamed down his face, and my favourite bit, the three amigos while the crowd chanted Eddie. The latter might've been something they did plan, as the PPV fell on the anniversary of Eddie Guerrero's death, but he knew those Eddie chants were for Kingston and he decided to do the Guerrero spot THEN and I don't think anybody needs to worry about him getting heat whenever they properly turn him heel. Kingston was phenomenal again. There's a realness about Eddie that almost no other wrestler can capture. He's raw in a way that not even Punk is, and after the Players' Tribune article he's relatable in a way that almost nobody is. Not necessarily in the sense that most of us can relate to wrestling on indie shows for fifteen bucks a night, more that we can relate to the broader struggle and sentiment that he conveyed so perfectly in that article. It's difficult not to want that man to succeed, and Punk WAS kind of a dickhead to him on Dynamite. Eddie captured every bit of that rawness in his performance and the crowd were going to live and die with him. Plus he tapped into that lunatic vein of his and tried to send Punk to the hospital, which at the end of the day is what we came for. Wiping Punk's blood over his own face like war paint, the mocking GTS call followed by the "what a jack off" gesture (legitimately one of the greatest moments in the history of our sport, btw), his unbelievable selling, just everything he did from the second he walked onto the ramp. This also might've had the best Frye/Takayama spot since the actual Don Frye and Yoshihiro Takayama were whomping each other in the face and I pray to the old gods and the new that we get this match up again in 2022. An incredible bitta wrestling.