5 Ups & 4 Downs From AEW Dynamite (2 Feb)

1. Peak Performance

Two elite performances by two elite pro wrestling in an elite big-match setting.

CM Punk vs. MJF was a roaring success. One of the best wrestling matches of this young year, it bore perhaps the greatest individual showing of MJF's career so far. Max was phenomenal against Darby Allin at Full Gear, but a level above in Chicago, not only playing the audience like a master politician, but also for the way he stooged off, structured his work, and attacked Punk's war wounds with laser focus. A crowd when the situation called for it but cold and calculated as soon as he tasted blood in the water, his performance was that of a crafty 25-year veteran, not a 25-year-old.

Punk, too, was sensational.

His AEW run is peaking, now, and matches like this are why 'Best in the World' has always been so fitting. That slow-burning, "happy to be here!" early AEW run has given way to Punk in his greatest form, now. Those days of shaking the rust off against undercard wrestlers are over. The veteran isn't getting back in the swing of things anymore: he's deep in this.

And deep in himself.

Punk fought with two broken wings. His left arm was destroyed when it crashed into the ring post, then MJF's continued assault, he later had his knee torn to shreds, giving his opponent another easy target. This yielded a phenomenal defensive performance from Punk, whose selling was on a different level. His injuries a constant hindrance, he not only limped and stumbled around the ring, the pain forcing him to pull out of Go To Sleeps and Sharpshooters, but constantly paused to slap, massage, and rub his muscles back to action.

When the situation got so desperate that Punk had to pull out the Pepsi Plunge (a move he stopped doing because of the damage it was doing to his knees) for the first time in 17 years, the veteran sold it as much as his opponent. This performance re-asserted Punk as a master of establishing multiple threads within a match, letting them evolve, then eventually knitting them all together - and it's because of things like this.

The little things.

Those that matter the most.

The Dusty Finish was expertly employed to generate an almighty kick in the gut early on, before Punk blasted back with all the fire in the world. Wardlow's involvement was exactly what it needed to be, too. The big man slipped MJF the diamond ring so covertly it was tough to pick up on it until the replay. Then, afterwards, while MJF celebrated like a pig in sh*t, Wardlow looked like a man who'd completed a professional obligation. Nothing more.

Fantastic work across the board - and far from the end of the feud. Should the next couple of months progress like the first few, we could be looking at the greatest story in AEW's short history.