8 Ups & 2 Downs From AEW Dynamite (1 May - Results & Review)

7. Claudio Castagnoli Vs Brian Cage

One of the hardest ways to get over in present day AEW is by having matches.

There’s such an abundance of great ones that you stand a chance of looking incredibly ordinary if yours doesn’t hit the heights. The contests are often dropped on television in the absence of character development, and though matches can be and are stories themselves, when there’s not enough run-up or follow-through for what feels like an untenable number of characters to keep up with, the in-ring fades from memory by the time you’re on to the next match. It’s not even a problem exclusive to AEW either - the bar has been raised exponentially over the years to the point where North American matches probably once considered TV classics would be left gasping for air by the most basic high quality back-and-forth in 2024.

And that’s exactly what Claudio Castagnoli Vs Brian Cage was. “Predictably good” damns a lot of contests with faint praise, but these are at very least two men who are over rather than needing to get there, and their arsenals being so complimentary obscured this was a record-resetting exercise for the Blackpool Combat Club man after his Collision loss to Swerve Strickland. The power exchanges were as you’d imagine, the aerials and speed bursts less so until you remember exactly what these two in particular can conjure.

Claudio is an in-form wrestler at present (evergreen sentence, yes), but the definitive defeat against Strickland rules him out of competing at the highest level for now. There are other belts and other Champions though, and this very possibly existed here for a reason that would be revealed later on.