AEW Double Or Nothing 2021

BRIAN CAGE vs. ADAM PAGE - 7.5/10

This was a great big-moves opener. The big moment here was Cage having the advantage but his Team Taz teammates, whom he had told to stay in the back, came out to try enable him to cheat to put Page away via belt shot, but Cage refused, and this gave Page time to recover and hit the Buckshot Lariat for the win. Cage and Team Taz got into a brief shoving match after the match, and Cage walked out. Taz was on commentary the whole time, and reacted to everything perfectly.

AEW WORLD TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH:
The Young Bucks(c) (w/Brandon Cutler) vs. Jon Moxley & Eddie Kingston - 9/10

Before the match, they aired a video package claiming that the Bucks have �"abandoned a lot of the things that got them to the top” by turning heel, which is a completely ridiculous statement. Every time the Bucks have gotten hot in their career, it has been as heels!

Unlike that video package, however, this match was excellent. They dealt with all of the potential outside involvement (Cutler, Gallows, Anderson, Kazarian) in ways that either felt like they worked with the match rather than getting in the way, and did a tremendous job of making the clash of styles work. Did I think the babyfaces using the heels’ stolen shoes as weapons was both stupid and worked against the intended face/heel dynamic? Yes. Do I wish they hadn’t had the babyfaces jump the heels while the heels were blinded by their own entrance gimmick? Yes. Do I wish they hadn’t just given up on the concept of having to tag in and out halfway through? Yes. But none of that was enough to really detract from my enjoyment of the match.

CASINO BATTLE ROYALE FOR A FUTURE SHOT AT THE AEW WORLD TITLE - 5.5/10

Paul Wight was on commentary for this match said nothing useful. But he was still better than Jim Ross, who attributed Brian Pillman Jr.’s popularity to the recent Dark Side of the Ring documentary on his father rather, for example, Pillman being talented.

If the wrestlers in the various card groups aren’t going to all enter at the same time, why do the groups at all? Just do it Royal Rumble-style with staggered individual entries.

I was surprised at how well the fans reacted to Max Castor. I guess I’m not in the minority.

Penta el 0M was wearing a Joker-inspired outfit that has to be one of the ugliest things I have ever seen a pro wrestler wear.

There were a few storyline tidbits in here, but nowhere near enough to carry me through a long battle royale full of guys who rarely make it into matches on the main show. Also, knowing that (because of the format of the match) the big surprise would be at the end kind of made everything that came before it feel dull. More storyline things really have helped this.

The big surprise at the end who everyone was waiting for was Lio Rush. I like Lio a lot and there are a lot of people in the company that I’d like to see him wrestle, but I’m worried he’ll get lost in the shuffle because the roster is so big. Then again, I guess I’m making an assumption that he’s in for more than this one match. I also think I kind of got myself in a �"Dragon, Punk, Andrade, or bust” mindset, so my disappointment/wariness about Lio is probably unwarranted.

The final two were Jungle Boy and Christian. They had a great little segment, with Jungle Boy getting the big win. I’m sure his match against Kenny will be awesome, but if it was me booking, I would have had Christian win instead. I totally understand the fear that if he beat Jungle Boy the crowd would turn on him, but I think they need to pay off the Christian/Kenny thing before they can start to figure out where Christian really slots into the roster, and if the fans do turn on him for beating Jungle Boy then that just lets AEW know where to slot Christian. You could also use the established Christian/Kaz relationship and Kaz’s �"Elite Hunter” storyline to transition from Kenny/Christian into Kenny/Kaz and that’s a good six to eight week of TV and two solid TV world title defenses while you build up a new challenger (and the other benefit to doing this would be that you are now establishing that coming in second place in battle royales for a title shot is Jungle Boy’s thing, which you could keep going until whenever you’re ready to pay it off by having him win one). But that’s mostly me fantasy booking (although I really do think they need to pay off Kenny/Christian before start figuring out where to slot Christian). Jungle Boy winning here is more than fine.

ANTHONY OGOGO (w/Q.T. Marshall) vs. CODY RHODES (w/Arn Anderson) - 6.25/10

Cody gave his weight-belt to a youngster in the front row. Good. That means went annoy me by being completely inconsistent as to whether or not hitting someone with it is a DQ.

Ogogo apparently injured his ribs training for this match, so Cody got to work those over. They did some stuff and it was a perfectly fine (although not really PPV-quality) professional wrestling match, but it felt inauthentic to me because it was so… well… normal. This didn’t feel anything like the Anthony Ogogo we have seen on TV. That dude relies on his punches. This guy threw his big punch right away, Cody survived it, and they had a pretty normal professional wrestling match. After Cody’s clean win (after surviving the superpunch a second time, so that move is kind of dead), Excalibur pushed the idea that Cody won because he �"turned this into a wrestling match” instead of letting Ogogo throw strikes, but it never really felt like Cody was forcing that in any way. It didn’t feel like Cody was constantly taking Ogogo to the mat or getting behind him to prevent him from throwing his punches; it felt like Ogogo just wasn’t throwing them because that wasn’t the spot. This match showed that Antony Ogogo is a perfectly competent professional wrestler (or maybe Cody carried him. I’ve never wrestled, so I can’t really tell that sort of thing), but the purpose of this match wasn’t to do that. The purpose of this match was to pay off a storyline, and this match failed to do that for me because the Anthony Ogogo wrestling this match here felt like a completely different person from the Anthony Ogogo we have seen in this storyline.

AEW TNT TITLE MATCH:
Miro(c) vs. Lance Archer - 5.75/10

Jake Roberts was not at ringside for this match because Miro took him out with a cheap-shot at a weigh-in yesterday. Why are we doing weigh-ins when none of the matches have weight limits?

They brawled on the outside forever and Aubrey Edwards never tried to count them out. She also didn’t disqualify Archer for purposely putting Miro through a table. They had a decent brawl for a bit. Miro had control of the match, but Jake Roberts came out to try to interfere, so Miro beat him up and threw the bag (supposedly) containing his snake way up the ramp. I found Miro’s actions to completely reasonable.

This distraction allowed Archer to take control. Archer got some nearfalls, but Miro got control back by kicking the middle rope into Archer’s nuts, then won by stoppage. I don’t understand why I’m supposed to be angry at Miro for that when Archer put him through a table and had his old friend try to sic a predatory animal on him.

AEW WORLD WOMEN’S TITLE MATCH:
Hikaru Shida(c) vs. Dr. Britt Baker, DMD (w/Rebel) - 8.5/10

Absolutely tremendous back-and-forth action. I don’t think there was a single false finish that they didn’t have me biting on. Yeah, some spots could have gone smoother, but it wasn't enough to really detract from the match for me. It would have been nice if Jim Ross didn’t get in the way of my post-awesome-match euphoria by insisting to us that the match �"made sense” (whatever that possibly means in kayfabe), though.

DARBY ALLIN & STING vs. ETHAN PAGE & SCORPIO SKY - 7.5/10

This was about the third or fourth match already tonight that had them brawling before the bell. I guess that’s the PPV version of the post-match attack on Dynamite.

I really wish Ross and Schiavone would stop pointing out to us how old Sting is. We know he’s old, but you don’t need to remind us that the man has been wrestling on a national stage since before what willing to bet is more than half of your fanbase was born (myself included).

Anyway, they had a match that truly adored. The heels got to look mean, Darby got to look tough, and Sting got to look great. I haven’t seen him look like this since early in his TNA run. And I know the whole thing is smoke and mirrors, but it doesn’t matter, because if you structure the match the right way, I can lose myself in the fantasy.

AEW WORLD TITLE MATCH:
Kenny Omega(c) vs. Pac vs. Orange Cassidy - 9/10

Orange Cassidy cares so much about this match that on his first opportunity to pin people, he made lazy covers, then did comedy with the referee, asking if it was a three count when the other guy kicked out at one. That was a bad start, but fortunately, it was only one of two times that OC took away from this otherwise amazing match (the other was an idiotic spot where Kenny was lining up for a third V-Trigger, and OC made a big show of putting his hands in his pockets before fainting). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The man himself is talented, but the Orange Cassidy gimmick if stupid goofy bullsh*t. The more he comes across as Unmasked Fire Ant in Orange Cassidy’s clothes, the better.

With that expression of my frustration out of the way, I can talk about how awesome this match was. It was the usual indy-riffic three-way formula of just a series of big spots rather than story, but the spots were awesome and were paced out pretty much perfectly.

I was 100% certain that the belt wasn’t going to change hands here so none of the false finishes felt plausible to me, but instead of thinking �"yeah, that’s getting kicked out of,” I found myself instead thinking �"given better build, I probably would have bitten on this.” That thought process resulted in me liking the two challengers getting their visual not-quite wins that were thwarted by either someone attacking the ref, or, in the case of OC’s pin of Kenny, the referee being knocked out. I went into this match not thinking that OC or Pac were viable contenders, but coming out of this match, I certainly see them as possibilities to actual win the title in the challenges that should result from those visual not-quite victories (I don’t think either of them will take the belt from Kenny, but it’s now a 75% certainty rather than the 100% it was going in).

MARK HENRY WILL BE A COMMENTATOR ON RAMPAGE - I like Mark a lot and he's a good get in terms of person to have around, but- like with Big Show- we don't have any real evidence that he is a good commentator, so I'm wary of this move, especially at the expense of someone like Veda Scott.

STADIUM STAMPEDE IN WHICH IF THE INNER CIRCLE LOSE, THEY MUST DISBAND:
The Inner Circle vs. the Pinnacle - 7.75/10

On the whole, I was loving this until the FTR/LAX segment. There are random people in a bar in the building. Are the Khans idiots? They’ve let their wrestling company use the football stadium for a violent gang fight and thought it was a good idea to keep the patio club part of the building open? Some of those poor patrons were assaulted by LAX and FTR FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON! Then, these two teams who were so angry at each other that they attacked innocent people simply for being in the way of the direct pact between them… decided to nicely and calmly share a drink together. They we zoomed in to show that DJ was Konnan because apparently someone in this company has no idea how to minimize your big conflict. When Superman and General Zod are about to start fighting, they zoom in on the window of an office building to show you that one of the people staring down at them is Tom Hanks, because it breaks the mood that you need for you big conflict by drawing attention to something that is 1) completely unnecessary and unrelated, and 2) makes the audience happily think, �"hey! It’s Tom Hanks!” when you want them to be excited and trepidatious about the impeding battle and its outcome!

Other things that bothered me included the Jaguars personnel cameos and the coach’s �"holy sh*t,” (that close-up of the coach for a �"holy sh*t” at the end is the sort of comedic crap that they needed to stay away from because it kills the tone), the baseball bat randomly being where Jericho needed I, and the random motorcyclists who Shawn Spears had tot dodge. I also thought them winding up in Daily’s Place was kind of weird. It’s a Stadium Stampede. You shouldn’t be leaving the cage during a cage match, and you shouldn’t be leaving the stadium during a Stadium Stampede. And that goes even more so for trying to pin someone. That shouldn’t be allowed in a Stadium Stampede. I understand that they wanted to do some spots in front of the live crowd, but if that’s what you wanted to do, then don’t call it Stadium Stampede. Just call it �"Falls Count Anywhere.” And, just to round out the things I didn’t like, I thought the spot where Hager and Wardlow went through the obviously fake wall was not good.
All of that aside, I really did like the match. I loved everything Hager and Wardlow did, and 99% of what the Jericho/MJF and Sammy/Spears pairings did, and I liked Sammy being the one to win the match for the Inner Circle. It felt like a realistic fight, and that’s what I want out of my blood-feud grudge match.

That being said, I didn’t like the formula here. It just didn’t feel like a match. I think the issue is that the teams are just too big, so focusing on each pairing for a few minutes and then jumping to another made it feel less like a wrestling match and more like the climactic fight in a movie. More pinfalls would have helped, but even with that, if you’re going to do a match like this in the future, I think it should be kept to AT MOST two vs. two.

Final Thoughts
This was an outstanding show from AEW. Archer vs. Miro was disappointing and Cody vs. Ogogo didn’t work for me, but there was certainly nothing bad on the show, and there was A LOT of high-quality professional wrestling. I’d have to go back and look at the various TakeOvers and nights of Wrestle Kingdom just to be sure I’m not forgetting something, but as of right now, this feels like it has easily been the best show of the year so far.