6 Ups & 4 Downs From AEW Dynamite (10 April - Results & Review)

1. The Video

In sending out FTR to act as frustrated voices of reason following what was sure to be the most divisive part of the episode, Tony Khan was trying to have his cake and eat it, and Tony Schiavone and Taz knew that all-too-well. They’d lived through plenty of this sort of thing in the past.

Ahead of throwing to Matthew and Nicholas Jackson revealing whatever it was they had from All In: London, the tenured announcers looked the most at-length from All Elite Wrestling as they ever had before. Neither man was able to hold eye contact with the viewer as poor Excalibur teed up the segment, nor were either really that keen to look at the monitor for what was to come. When Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler burst through the tunnels to respond to what we’d all seen, Schiavone even had to utter the dreaded “this is not on the format” line - a one perhaps more associated with the dying days of Monday Nitro than anything else uttered on that broadcast during its ill-fated final year.

The voices of authority, reason and respect knew they were about to lose elements of all three by acknowledging what they’d just seen, because they were working at the behest of a billionaire with a real grudge to address rather than the fictional characters inhabiting the universe they’re paid to put over as real. It had also discounted pretty much everything Adam Copeland had said seven days earlier too - AEW was not the wrestling utopia he had spoken so defiantly of, but just another billionaire's playground with schoolyard squabbles to match.

The voices of reason weren't and aren't welcome in situations such as these. Such, subsequently, is the difficulty with this sort of thing and one of the reasons why the footage airing to total silence was absolutely the move…