Swerve's protein intake must've been significantly lower at this point than it is today. Apparently these two have had seven previous singles matches before this one as well, which is a valuable piece of insight from the commentators because it gave some of the counters and reversals a bit of context. I thought this was really good and probably one of my favourite Strickland matches. He stood firm on that early tope and took it full in the chest, then he took over with a nice leg sweep on the apron that Darby of course landed hard on. I'm not a Swerve guy and his offence can be pretty contrived, but the setups never felt super obvious here and most of what he hit looked brutal. The double stomp while Darby hung off the apron was wild and I liked that he played up his own ankle being hurt from it. You have to take some risks to put a maniac like Darby down and you don't always come out the other side in one piece. There was a pretty good example of that later when Swerve had Darby on his shoulder up on the apron, where I thought he was going to hit an electric chair or something to the floor, only for Darby to reverse it into a fucking poisonrana. I thought Swerve sold the ankle well the whole way too. It stopped him from being able to capitalise on big moves immediately and lent plausibility to Darby kicking out, while also giving Darby something to latch onto when he needed it. At one point I thought Darby was going to hang Swerve in a tree of woe in the corner but instead he took his boot off and just started biting the foot. Yeah, I liked this a lot.
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