5 Ups & 4 Downs From AEW Dynamite: Blood & Guts 2023 (Review)
4. Hottest Thing In The Company, Bay-Bay
Better Than You Bay-Bay are the most over act in the company.
If for a moment your resolve hardens and you begin to wonder if this is "worthy" main event material, it gets swept away just as quickly when that crowd stands on their feet and goes ballistic.
Their match against JAS remnants Sammy Guevara and Daniel Garcia was a wonderful exhibition of crowd psychology that was more exciting and dramatic than their previous showings in the Blind Eliminator. By last night, they had teed up the Double Clothesline bit. All that was left to do was to convince the crowd that they couldn't pull it off.
The various teases generated thunderous reactions, but this wasn't just a fun house show match premised on doing one move; it was well-worked and dramatic tag action outside of it. In one awesome spot, Cole ran the ropes only for Guevara to catch him on the back with a kick. It looked like the kick had a delayed effect on Cole, since he initially didn't react to it and stumbled backwards. What he was actually doing was creating sufficient distance with which to counter Guevara's springboard with a superkick. The timing on that out-of-nowhere spot was superb. Cole has rediscovered every drop of confidence.
In a great twist, Bay-Bay didn't just tease the double clothesline: Cole convinced MJF to perform his first ever dive. What a stonking pop that drew, Jesus Christ. A wrestler performing a defined move-set and only deviating from it within the parameters of a wrestling storyline: this was the beautiful opposite of an expositive scripted promo.
Normally, very pedantic wrestling fans would ask why on earth a set of disco lights would be a default preset on a piece of production equipment: when MJF fiddled with a mixing desk that had somehow found itself next to the ring, the TD Garden suddenly morphed into a 1970s nightclub. And then the dance-off happened.
In execution, as a fan of peak PWG, this was great. This was far more incredulous, tangential Reseda riffing than WWE 24/7 "comedy", but suspension of disbelief was elasticised beyond recognition. If AEW was a proper sports-oriented presentation, the incredulity might have worked better, as with Le Dinner Debonair; as it is, AEW is becoming an actual sports entertainment promotion, so the intended jarring effect didn't last as well as it would have in 2020. This was no Stadium Stampede detour; it was a bit hard to determine whether this is just...the direction now.
How much does that matter when it is so unbelievably over and entertaining? How could you not pop for Daniel Garcia making sweet and deep penetrative love to the ring apron? How could you not raise a smile when Adam Cole thrust his hips like a complete goofball, finally getting over as the universally beloved babyface he was fated to be?
He looked at the World title longingly in the post-match, which upset MJF. The feud is happening soon - but it's much too soon for, and this is no exaggeration, everybody in the arena.