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

4. Swerve Strickland's Opponent Set For Double Or Nothing

Swerve Strickland acknowledging the Tony Khan attack from last week was crucial, and not just because it set up The Elite announcing his challenger and effectively establishing beef between the two sides. The fundamental problem with running an angle like the one AEW are choosing to go with is that it makes the seat behind the scenes more powerful than the throne out front.

Wrestlers should go to work to win titles, ideally the top one, and not concern themselves with if management are doing a good job. It has worked on occasion but descended so far into parody that it became the norm in WWE - loser GMs and their cavalcade of assistants were a plague on Raw and SmackDown for years, and the characters coming in-built with a hatred for top babyfaces was neither logical nor ever well-explained.

Strickland's refusal to sanction the attack as anything other than a "bitch move" was yet again there to raise the ire of The Elite for something bigger down the line, and in the meantime, Matthew and Nicholas set Swerve up for the beatdown he received from new challenger Christian Cage. Cage invoking the attack on Nick Wayne was the right thread to pull at, not least because it will force Strickland to atone for and/or defend many of the sins he committed on the way to the top. Swerve brought up sacrificing time with his children on Saturday only to have that used against him on Wednesday. Important little things like that made AEW amazing once before, and the less those tenets are betrayed, the more the chance the company stands of getting there again.