FTR Finally Get to Defend Their IWGP Tag Team Championships, Still Want the AEW Tag Titles

By Connor Casey

FTR collected their third set of tag team championships back at Forbidden Door when they beat The United Empire's Great-O-Khan & Jeff Cobb and Roppongi Vice for the IWGP Tag Team Championships. But since then the pair have only competed in one standard tag team match on television, defeating The Briscoes in an excellent Two-Out-of-Three Falls match at the Ring of Honor Death Before Dishonor event. 

That looks to finally be changing as New Japan confirmed on Monday that Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler will defend their IWGP tag titles for the first time at the Royal Quest II event on Oct. 1 at the Crystal Palace in London. They'll be taking on another two members of the United Empire in Aussie Open, who were recently on AEW programming alongside Will Ospreay in the AEW World Trios Championship tournament. Both Wheeler and Harwood also recently took to Twitter to indicate they finally want the AEW World Tag Team Championships back. 

The pair have been sitting atop the rankings of AEW's tag team division for months but inexplicably have not been in so much as a No. 1 Contender's match for the tag titles since February. It seemed like the plan was for them to face The Young Bucks at All Out with all four championships on the line, but those plans were scrapped. 

"I'm very happy with this match Sunday that we're going to have. But I thought that was the direction to go, us versus The Young Bucks for all the marbles, as they say. I think the way things lined up kind of naturally. There was no plan in place, but like a lot of things happen that changed the title scene, like our babyface turn. Was it something that we had thought about like a planned far out in advance? No," Wheeler told Give Me Sport ahead of All Out. "So when it started happening, we're just kind of riding the wave with it, trying to figure it out as we go. So like the fact that it was kind of all culminating at the same time, and leading to what I thought would have been the perfect build to it, because it was just, you know, all these outside forces kind of setting it up, for what would have been a huge money match for as far as tag team wrestling goes. But I understand there's a lot of injuries that happened. There's a lot of moving parts in the wrestling business. And it's not easy kind of getting everything to go."

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