CM Punk and Adam Cole both made their surprise arrivals in AEW earlier this year and were among the wrestlers who appeared at an AEW panel at the C2E2 convention this past weekend in Chicago. Both men have publicly addressed how they’ve been used the company so far — neither have suffered a loss in singles action but neither have come anywhere close to the AEW World Championship picture nor have they stepped in the ring with most of the promotion’s top stars. Cole said during the panel he felt there were five years worth of fresh matchups waiting for him in the company.
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“I look back at my debut here in Chicago as the greatest night of my wrestling career strictly because so many awesome moments for me, watching as a fan were watching really big returns or exciting surprises,” Cole said (h/t Fightful). “So to be able to say that in my career, I got to be involved in one of those things was really really cool. That’s just on that night alone. But aside from that fact, I mean, just looking objectively, there’s like five years’ worth of stuff for me and the rest of this roster to be able to do because the roster is so stacked right now. The different options and different choices are different matches and ways we could go just have to be excited so I know if I’m really excited about it and our roster’s really excited about it. I know you the fans are excited about it, too.”
“Before I even came back, I always heard about, ‘I want to see MJF and CM Punk go back and forth,’ and a lot of people think I am off to a slow start in AEW, you know, I’m doing certain things a certain way. But to me, just like Adam Cole said, there is five years worth of stuff with all these interchangeable characters and players,” Punk later added. “MJF is definitely somebody I wanted to share a ring with. Yeah, and I think now that we’re getting to it, I think people kind of can maybe see the bigger picture, and they can trust AEW as a whole for the direction of where stuff goes. The fans. I understand they want to know the behind-the-scenes stuff, they want to peel back the curtain and everybody’s an armchair booker. I am. Everybody’s an armchair, you know, coach or quarterback or whatever. That’s human nature… it’s no different than, I think, pro wrestling fans and stuff like that.”
“But to me, one of the best things about AEW is we enjoy payoffs. We like making the fans happy instead of just for some reason, making them miserable and doing stuff just to piss them off,” he continued.
