9 Match Star Ratings For AEW Full Gear 2020
1. Jon Moxley Vs. Eddie Kingston - World Championship I Quit Match
In a strange but no less potent way, this benefitted from (or at least wasn't hurt by) a crowd sapped by the Elite Deletion. A harrowing match best watched pensively and in a state of genuine apprehension, this, ironically, was a restrained death match main event.
It didn't aim to pop the crowd with unhinged stunts but draw them, against their moral compass, into a gruesome attritional war. This wasn't crafted to impress, but to disturb and convince. Eddie Kingston's incredible presence never allowed it to descend into dreaded methodical territory, and it was much, much too stiff to be drab. Kingston's strikes were disgusting, and in a moment that benefitted from the pace and informed the heft of the finish, he teed off on Mox's face with a barbed wire-wrapped fist in a fast and shocking moment of violent electricity.
Restrained probably isn't the word, when Mox ended up with thumbtacks in his f*cking head only to effectively garrotte Kingston at the finish. But there was nothing superfluous to this, nothing that climbed just to fall down.
That finish was incredible. Mox advised Kingston to "protect his neck" in the build. Set on shredding it with barbed wire, pausing only to keep him conscious to extract the result, Mox had it won. In a superb bit of acting, referee Bryce Remsburg knew it, and pleaded with his old friend.
"You're done," he said, and he was.
Star Rating: ★★★★