10 Best Times AEW Threw Shade At WWE
3. Cody Breaks The Throne
A lot of people despised this.
A lot of people deemed it a desperate, snivelling, bitter spot of smark service, and in that sense, it worked. Cody broke a mock Triple H throne at Double Or Nothing to declare the arrival of AEW as a true, disrupting alternative - a revolution in defiance of a monarchy that let its fans eat the caked sh*t of sports entertainment with no consideration of their voice.
The timing was more effective than the idea itself; Cody broke that throne precisely when Triple H seemed to get (outwardly) drunk on its power. He had allowed the soul of NXT to rot in a quest to secure every last hot independent talent, barely utilising too many of them. If Triple H was the King of Kings, he had become Henry VIII.
This was a power play engineered by a very intelligent man offering a brochure to an old world, once thought unrecoverable, elevated with the best modern talent.
It was an intoxicating gesture to the WWE bitters, and if it was a hollow appeal to those less impassioned, Cody substantiated by wrestling a better old-school match than his new contemporary had managed in years and years - if not ever.