It's Official: The Young Bucks Are Wrestling's Greatest Ever Tag Team
Killing the business of bad faith critique.
The absolute worst take in all of professional wrestling fandom is this:
The Young Bucks don't understand wrestling psychology! They just do flips!
It is a take unleashed in bad faith or from a position of pathetic ignorance drip-fed by - yes - bad faith actors. This isn't ancient Greece, for f*ck's sake. The idea isn't to pummel the opponent into submission after three hours of crawling around on hand and foot. Aerial risks existed decades before the Young Bucks perfected the art, and the art itself is so weirdly diminished by certain quarters of the wrestling fandom. It is considered artless, almost, because the aerial manoeuvre is a shortcut to a pop and is used excessively in North America.
Notwithstanding the fact that the style is so prevalent because it is over, there's a genuine, under-appreciated craft to putting together an aerial banger even if there's little narrative depth to it. It's easier than some realise to lose the crowd as a result of that excess or bad/front-loaded pacing. Building and building the sort of white-hot exhilaration that makes a crowd completely lose their minds is art, storytelling, psychology, craftsmanship, all of it. Without the crescendo, these matches live down to their reputation, and reaching that crescendo is monumentally difficult, particularly since there are so many more moving parts than the singles match. The match type that is considered the easiest crowdpleaser is one of the most difficult to execute well.
Over the summer months, AEW presented three big multi-man tag team matches on Dynamite: The Young Bucks & FTR Vs. The Butcher, The Blade & the Lucha Bros., The Elite & FTR Vs. The Dark Order, and the Inner Circle Vs. Best Friends & Jurassic Express. All three matches boasted excellent workers. Two of these "easy spot-fests" were incredible, and one fell so far off the rails it was almost unbelievable. Almost, until you consider the common denominators: Matt and Nick Jackson. But he real genius behind the Young Bucks is that, at their very best, they fuse this exhilaration with incredible depth.
The Young Bucks are fantastic, but they weren't always.
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