All Elite Wrestling’s most brutal stipulation returned this week. AEW Dynamite: Blood & Guts brought back the double steel cage to settle the months-long feud between The Elite and Blackpool Combat Club. This story has been brewing since the very first AEW event, AEW Double or Nothing, when Jon Moxley kicked off his feud against Kenny Omega. While both men were singles stars back then, they eventually became faction leaders, and their groups echoed the same bad blood that the two possessed in their solo rivalry. Mix in the layered history with Pac and Hangman, a debuting Kota Ibushi, and the Don Callis variable, and you have AEW’s culmination of one of its most layered stories ever conceived.
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Somehow, nothing within the titular Blood & Guts match took home the highlight of the night.
Earlier in the show, AEW World Champion Maxwell Jacob Friedman and Adam Cole met Sammy Guevara and Daniel Garcia in the finals of the Blind Eliminator Tag Team Tournament. MJF and Cole began as rivals, wrestling to a 30-minute time-limit draw last month on television before they were forcibly paired together in the random duos bracket. Over the subsequent weeks, MJF and Cole produced some of the best strange bedfellows segments in recent years, with many drawing parallels of the two’s lightning in a bottle paired popularity to that of Kane and Daniel Bryan or Steve Austin and Kurt Angle.
MJF and Cole built their team’s popularity outside of AEW TV too. Shortly after forming, MJF called Cole during a Twitch stream and suggested that the two utilize a double clothesline for their tag team’s finisher. MJF would push for the double clothesline on social media and television in the weeks to come, eventually hyping up that they would hit the maneuver in Boston on Wednesday.
As MJF and Cole made their tandem entrance, multiple “DOUBLE CLOTHESLINE” signs could be spotted in the TD Garden crowd. Seconds into the match, fans were chanting “double clothesline!” After a couple of fake-out teases, Cole tagged in MJF. Together, they threw Garcia into the ropes, and when his momentum brought him back in their direction, MJF and Cole finally hit the move, and the home of the Boston Celtics nearly lost its roof.
One Year Later, MJF’s Pipebomb Still Rings True
AEW Dynamite: Blood & Guts personified a key line from MJF’s now-famous pipebomb promo in June 2022.
“You guys pretended I sucked in the ring for a long time. And why is that, huh? Is it because I’m not untrained like all your faves? Because I don’t pretend to watch New Japan? Because I don’t dump my opponents on their hands? Because I’m not reckless? What is it? Is it because I’m not chasing star ratings?” MJF said. “How could I possibly be the best? Well newsflash, I am the best. I’m the best in the world, because I’m the only guy that makes you feel. And unlike all those boys, I don’t got to do a bunch of bulls–t to get you there.”
413 days later, a double clothesline got a bigger pop than a suplex onto a bed of nails, a piledriver onto broken glass, or a pendulum stomp through a table.
That’s not to say those Blood & Guts maneuvers were without merit. The match itself was designed to be a hardcore spectacle and it was in fact the culmination of a feud built on violence, but there’s something to be said about what today’s wrestling fans value.
“What I wish young guys would understand and learn is you get way more out of being a charismatic phenom than you do out of f–king risking your life trying to do a maneuver,” MJF said at the AEW Double or Nothing press conference.
As evident by WWE’s years-long Bloodline storyline, fans crave stories, characters, and payoffs. Sometimes this means carefully crafting a narrative over numerous months and pumping it full of nuance, twists, and turns. Other times, it’s as simple as teasing a double clothesline for a couple of weeks.
