Chris Jericho Responds to Critics Who Hated the Ending of AEW Blood & Guts

AEW's first Blood & Guts Match ended on a dramatic note last week when MJF forced The Inner Circle to surrender to prevent him from throwing a bloodied Chris Jericho off the steel cage roof. Friedman decided to shove his former mentor off anyway, sending him crashing through the entrance ramp below. But while the match itself received plenty of praise for its sheer brutality, many critics were vocal about how the camera shot of Jericho falling made it abundantly clear he was landing safely on a crash pad. Jericho responded to those critics on the latest Talk Is Jericho.

"I tell Max, 'Give me a shove' because I needed to feel something so I could take a pushback," Jericho said (h/t Fightful). "I step back and I thought the bump would go by fast, but I just kept looking at him as I fell. Then, I landed, and of course, it takes the breath out of you. I've seen a few people bagging on it being a crashpad. It was no crashpad, it was a cardboard box. I don't give a shit if it was a crash pad, you just go for it. It felt great, obviously, it hurt, but I could move my arms and legs and I wasn't dead. The crowd went completely silent and I just laid there until they took me away on a stretcher and the people [in attendance at Daily's Place] started clapping.

"It was later on that I started hearing 'the fall didn't look great.' For me, when I watched it back, I thought it looked amazing," he continued. "When you watch it back, I barely missed hitting my head on the lights on the stage. I almost overshot everything. Everyone in the business knows how dangerous this can be and how terrifying it is and the margin for error is slim. You have the right to bag on it. Out of the 1.3 million who watched, if 3,000 people didn't like it, that's a very small percentage. Most people thought it was crazy and I got great feedback."

AEW is looking to follow up that show (which was the highest-rated show on cable for the night for the first time in the show's history) with another loaded card tonight. Check out the lineup below:

• AEW TNT Championship: Darby Allin vs. Miro
• AEW World Tag Team Championships: The Young Bucks vs. SCU
• IWGP United States Championship: Jon Moxley vs. Yuji Nagata
• PAC vs. Orange Cassidy (AEW World Championship No. 1 contender match)
• Thunder Rosa vs. TBA