6 Ups & 4 Downs From AEW Dynamite (17 May - Review)
3. Roderick Strong Vs Chris Jericho
Perfection.
This was perfection. Roderick Strong and Chris Jericho battled for 14 scintillating minutes and every second of it was perfection. Juggling strong style with arena brawl chaos and just about every genre in between, the two had a war so epic that their names will be inexorably linked together forever.
A chop fight Gunther himself would be proud of spilled into the stands in short order as the Falls Count Anywhere stipulation gifted them the freedom of the building and their own creativity. Tables, stanchions and ice cream were all key weapons as the action never once let up, and a sequence on a stairwell somehow balanced heart-in-mouth terror with the comedic-feeling sensibilities of DDT and the last two minutes of an All Japan strike war.
The finish being exactly what everybody predicted was made sweeter by Jericho himself not seeing it coming. The battle needed to be out of the building for Adam Cole to extract some revenge for the JAS leader's recent crimes, and he got to do just that to steer Strong to a major win in his own debut. Run it back or just rerun it forever because if there is still such a thing as a spirt of AEW four years into the organisation's existence, it burst forth during every sensational second of this.