10 Best AEW Matches Ever (According To The Internet)
3. Kenny Omega Vs. Bryan Danielson - AEW Dynamite: Grand Slam I (9.57)
Was Tony Khan too cautious to optimise the unbelievable feeling he had generated at All Out 2021?
Probably.
The follow-up Dynamite was notable only for a Jon Moxley Vs. Minoru Suzuki main event, and even if the terrible look of amateur hour timekeeping didn't undermine it, Mox had just wrestled an ostensible exhibition match against another New Japan Da at the pay-per-view. The world did not change as promised.
Khan did bottle the feeling at Grand Slam when promoting the Kenny Omega Vs. Bryan Danielson dream match. "Dream" is the only word that adequately describes the entire presentation: the sight of both men sharing a ring was so surreal, so magic, that Danielson himself burst into a beaming smile.
The match was incredible, elevated by the feeling, but the smile on Bryan's face was replaced over 30 gruelling, best-in-class minutes with something exponentially more unsettling. His selling was expert. Everybody knows of Danielson's concussion history. Danielson knows that you know of it. He manipulated the anxiety in Arthur Ashe to a disturbing extent. If the V-Trigger is the most devastating-looking strike in wrestling, nobody, with the exception of Kazuchika Okada, has sold it as well.
With Danielson being such a master, his selling was subtle, but an impressive stadium-sized crowd registered it. The content and execution was first-rate, obviously. Omega countering the Busaiku knee with a powerbomb looked incredible because it looked, until the last possible moment, that the move was actually going to happen before the counter.
If there's an opposite to the flying nothing, Omega and Danielson devised it.