10 Ups & 2 Downs From AEW Double Or Nothing 2021

2. Three-Way Dance Triples The Drama

One of the best three-way matches ever, the range of this fabulous character dynamic was explored with such love and joy and craft.

Orange Cassidy was outstanding early as the sly, witty strategist that PAC and Kenny Omega gave no hope - a very effective story beat that informed the amazing, off the charts drama of the finish. PAC doesn't so much move as glitch through frames. He is phenomenal and was on great form even by his standards. In a really funny but profoundly unpopular spot deep in the match, when Orange grazed his shins in defiance, he just immediately kicked him right in the f*cking b*llocks. It was a three-way match, so he could, and he laid it in like he'd spent all of lockdown idly fantasising about the moment.

At the heart of the match was Kenny Omega, laying everything out with his sense of structural genius and, better yet, a real sense of relish. This match might have felt a bit like it on paper, but it wasn't random. Omega very much had an idea that Cassidy would make for the perfect third man in a three way, and he was. He played tackle dummy to great deadpan effect and was generally outstanding at playing with the old three-way clichés. Placing one's hands in one's pockets to avoid the tower of doom was - excuse me - vintage Orange Cassidy. The joke is always better when he illuminates the silliness of pro wrestling without mocking it.

Subverting the frantic cliché of the stereo cover spot with a "this close" shrug was hilarious too, and whether it was through the unique circumstances of the first "post"-pandemic show or otherwise, this had no right to work to the MOTYC level it did. Fun and comedic while also being incredibly dramatic, this was the most well-worked house show-style match of all-time. Some of these creative three-way sequences banged hard, there was no time to breathe during the last 10 minutes, and Omega's priceless hubristic cheating - married with the palpable desperation of Don Callis - formed a charged emotional core by the finish.

An absolutely unbelievable match blinding in its range and action.