AEW’s Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler (FTR) successfully defended their IWGP Tag Tea Championships against Aussie Open during New Japan’s Royal Quest II event on Saturday night. After the bout, Harwood grabbed a microphone and addressed the elephant in the room regarding their recent AEW booking — “First things first. Tony Khan, we still work for you. Book us, brother.”
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FTR currently hold the IWGP, AAA and ROH World Tag Team Championships, but their booking on AEW programming has been somewhat of a mystery throughout 2021. The pair haven’t wrestled a standard tag team match on AEW Dynamite since May, and aside from winning the IWGP titles at Forbidden Door the two have wrestled almost exclusively in trios matches or singles matches for Harwood. The two have been ranked No. 1 in the tag team division for months, and it seemed like that was finally getting addressed at Grand Slam when the two turned their attention to The Acclaimed only to get confronted by The Gunn Club instead.
The decorated champs spoke with ComicBook earlier this year. During the conversation, the two opened up about how their vision for tag team wrestling compares to Khan’s.
“I’m not going to say yes to it definitely being the same,” Harwood said. “I mean, we have our vision of tag team wrestling [and it] is completely different than probably anybody else’s in the world. And it should be. I mean, it would be really boring if everybody’s vision was exactly the same. But I think that we are still a brand new company. I think Tony is signing up the greatest talent in the world, not because he wants to lose money. He’s signing the best talent in the world right now, because he wants the fans to enjoy a product that he’s putting on.
“That’s the only reason,” he continued. “That’s the reason we have the greatest tag teams in the world working for us right now. Because he wants the fans to enjoy professional wrestling. And that’s it. And to see people, not our fans, because our fans are very smart, but to see people complain about that online blows my mind. You’re complaining about this man hiring CM Punk, or Daniel Bryan, or John Moxley, or FTR, or Sting or whoever, and I’m not categorizing ourselves with them, but I’m saying you’re complaining because he’s giving you a freaking treat man. He’s given you something you’ve never had before. A talent roster that you’ve never seen, that’s completely loaded. And so I hope he continues to bring in tag teams. I hope we bring in every single tag team in the world. Because I promise you the more he brings them in, the more Cash and I will step up and show that we are the best. And I think we’ve proved that we are the best because we’re so much different than everybody else. Man, I’m getting fired up because of that.”
