Who Came Up With AEW's Live Stadium Stampede Finish At Double Or Nothing 2021?
Here's who suggested the Stadium Stampede transition from a pretaped affair to Daily's Place.
All Elite Wrestling's second Stadium Stampede match went down at Double Or Nothing 2021 this past weekend, with The Inner Circle overcoming The Pinnacle, saving their own hides in a match that stipulated Chris Jericho's group would have to split up in the event of a defeat.
The match differentiated from the original Stampede in that it wasn't entirely pretaped. Instead of going fully cinematic, and keeping the lengthy main event within TIAA Bank Field's confines, the closing stretch saw the Stampede spill into Daily's Place. The last few minutes played out before the live pay-per-view crowd following a seamless transition.
Whose idea was this? Sammy Guevara's, apparently.
Speaking on SiriusXM's Busted Open Radio, Guevara revealed that he came up with the idea to include a live element in the match, drawing props from Chris Jericho and Tony Khan (h/t Wrestling Inc. for the transcription):-
“It was my idea to have the match go from the cinematic to end it into the live crowd. And they actually went with it. I was surprised too. Tony and Chris came up to me and said ‘that was a really good idea.’ I figured others went up to them and told them that idea, but apparently no one else did. They gave me credit for it, so that was really cool.”
Guevara ended up winning the match for his team, pinning Shawn Spears after stomping the Pinnacle man's face into a steel chair set up against the turnbuckles. Double Or Nothing 2021 closed on The Inner Circle celebrating in the ring.
Symbolic of AEW (and wrestling in general) finally coming out of the empty arena era and into a living, breathing live environment again, the finish at least gave the PPV a memorable visual to end on.