14 Ups & 4 Downs For AEW In 2020

8. Perfecting Pandemic Wrestling

All pandemic wrestling is bittersweet. Well, virtually all of it.

Every company to varying extents has produced excellent matches in spite of the most suboptimal conditions ever faced by the industry. But AEW has pioneered and perfected the imperfect, firstly by installing talent at ringside to emulate the noise of a live crowd. That reports of AEW morale are generally very high helped get over the idea that they were enthusiastic, and moreover, AEW utilised this device to drive various angles.

But it's not just Austin Gunn, a man who deserves an honourable Up unto himself. AEW on three separate, glorious occasions conceived matches they likely wouldn't have, were it not for the pandemic.

Faced with deafening silence and depressing space, the company extracted opportunity from crisis.

The Elite defeated the Inner Circle at Stadium Stampede, in which 10 creative workers, some the most creative in the history of the business, utilised a football stadium as an epic blank canvas on which to paint a masterpiece of creativity and improbable levity.

Secondly, the Young Bucks and the Butcher and the Blade beat the sh*t out of one another where the punters would have congregated in the old world. They weren't there now, so why not send the Blade up an escalator? Why not use that space to work a wild, madcap brawl?

Thirdly, in one of the best brawls ever, the Best Friends and Santana and Ortiz worked a brutal and fabulously constructed Parking Lot fight so brilliant in how understated the actual wrestling was.

A ***** match with no fans (!), it was, possibly, the greatest flex ever by a company with much to brag about.