Jump to 6:00 minutes to start the discussion.
WWE's NXT to Move From USA Network to CW in New Rights Deal I know a lot of people are going to suggest that with this move, they should start doing their weekly show from small venues or arenas. I think they should stay at the performance center, keep a “studio wrestling” feel and make it look and feel different from the big two (RAW and Smackdown) which are at different arenas each week.
Full Gear was an absolutely fantastic PPV with an absolutely dogshit main event. Overall, a solid 9.5/11. Steve-O, Ken Jeong, and other celebrities were featured on camera. Many wrestlers were hurled at other wrestlers (one of my favorite kinds of wrestling), and MJF got hospitalized on the pre-show (this becomes infuriating later). Everything else was pretty much top tier wrestling.
The Patriarchy (Christian Cage, Nick Wayne, and their pet wrestle dino) and Sting and Co. (Darby and Edge Adam Copeland + sex pest) both had fun entrances. Christian made sure to stay away from Copeland as much as possible to let their eventual match simmer. He also pulled a face move by giving Flair a lowblow before noping out from a looming defeat. Everyone made sure to continue making Sting look mint. Cage’s team (and Darby) tried to make sure Darby couldn’t climb Mt. Everest, but he managed to walk away after they secured the win.
Orange Cassidy has come far from the “He’s gonna try!” days of 2021. He’s been stuck on “Try” for the better part of a year and has hopefully put Moxley behind him with this win.
Timeless Toni Storm put away perennial interim/crowdless champion Hikaru Shida with a steel-assisted Sweet Cheek Music. Toni’s washed-up starlet gimmick is over and Shida’s not allowed to have a character (just knock-off 90s X-Men music), so Storm gets the strap.
The ladder match for the tag-team titles delivered more ladder-based violence than necessary. It was great to see the House of Black doing actual wrestling after just looming for far too long.
Julia Hart became AEW’s youngest champion at 22 years of age after making the most of triple-threat rules. She’s come so far from the chipper, blonde cheerleader she was when she was initially misted (and has found a fantastic haberdashery). I’ll miss Statlander squatting the backstage interviewers, but I’m looking forward to Julia’s title run.
Next came a 4-way tag-team ladder match, which meant AEW wasn’t taking the titles from Ricky and Big Bill, they were just going to let LFI, FTR, and HoB do ladder-based violence to each other for a bit.
Bruv? Bruv! Bruv…
Hangman vs Swerve II (Texas Death Match) is an early contender for match of the decade. “Red mist” is usually a metaphor…not here, and it happened in the first five minutes! Any feud trying to build to this level of violence in the future will be hard-pressed to match it. How can you go further than breaking into someone’s house and leaving a “present” in their child’s crib?
Personally, I hope this loss turns Hangman heel because his “friends” in the Elite were too busy bickering backstage to help him when Brian Cage and Prince Nana came out to help Swerve, and Hanger puts them first in line when he gets back to hanging mans.
Omega & Jericho vs the Young Bucks chose a slot on the card to give the audience a bit of respite after the match that came before. The Bucks have said the need a minute IRL, so they wrote themselves off TV for a while and have yielded their spot as #1 contenders to Omega & Jericho.
After building up Jay White for months, he couldn’t even beat a one-legged-man in an ass kicking contest. He had goons send MJF to hospital earlier in the show (“injuring” one of his legs). He had goons interfere in the match. He took advantage of Cole “helping” MJF. And he ate the pin.
tl;dr - great show, but shit main event.