Two Matches Confirmed for AEW Dynamite Homecoming on New Year’s Day

This week’s AEW Dynamite served as the show’s first “season finale,” as the program won’t air another episodes until 2020. The Jan. 1 episode, which has been dubbed AEW: Dynamite Homecoming, will take place in Jacksonville, Florida at Daily’s Place, the same venue that hosted the Fight for the Fallen event earlier this year. So far two matches have already been confirmed — an AEW Women’s World Championship match between Riho and Kris Statlander and the long-awaited rematch between Cody Rhodes and Darby Allin. Statlander earned her shot at the title by beating Britt Baker on Dynamite this week, while Rhodes agreed to face Allin again after the high-flying skateboarder teamed up with him to take down The Butcher & The Blade.

Rhodes and Allin memorably went to a time-limit draw back at Fyter Fest, effectively putting the latter on the map as a rising star in the company.

During a recent episode of the Keepin‘ It 100 podcast, Chris Jericho made the comparison between Allin and a young Jeff Hardy.

“Darby Allin, you see him come out and people are dressing like him now,” Jericho said. “Kids and women are putting the face paint on. At first, you’re like, ‘who is this guy?’ Then I had him come down and attack me off the skateboard. Then we had the match where he had his hands tied behind his back and all that stuff. He did the crazy promo where he’s in a bodybag, getting crowd surfed at a punk rock show. Then he has an amazing match with Moxley. He’s made. He went from nothing to a legit made star in less than two months. He wants it. He reminds me a lot of Jeff Hardy. He’s got an x-factor to him.”

As for the rest of 2020, AEW has four pay-per-views planned for the year, starting with Revolution on Feb. 29. Tony Khan discussed the promotion’s pay-per-view plan after Full Gear in November.

“I’ve said from the beginning, I feel like we really want to do the best thing for our fans in terms of giving them value for the shows and giving a great quarterly pay-per-view experience,” Khan said. “And we’re going to keep doing that. It’s no secret that Double or Nothing, All Out and now Full Gear are big quarterly brands for us. So in Q1 there will be something, we’ll make an announcement very soon. But you’ll expect, given that we’re doing Double or Nothing [on] Memorial Day [weekend] again — that’s happening, Double or Nothing 2 is happening, you can expect to see shows the caliber of Double or Nothing, All Out and Full Gear, there’s going to be another one on that Mount Rushmore of quarterly big pay-per-view shows.”