The Young Bucks Address the Criticism Surrounding the Build to Their AEW Full Gear Match With FTR

The Young Bucks defeated FTR in what many considered a dream tag team match back at AEW's Full Gear pay-per-view, capturing the AEW World Tag Team Championships for the first time. And while the match was incredibly well-received, the build-up was met with a noticeable amount of criticism. The Bucks spent roughly a month teasing a heel turn that never really came, then added Matt Jackson's real-life leg injury into the story and piled on a stipulation that if the Bucks lost they'd never challenge for the tag titles again (immediately drawing comparisons to Cody Rhodes' stipulation from a year earlier).

The brothers addressed those criticisms in a new interview with Inside The Ropes this week. Nick Jackson started off by revealing the two wanted to keep holding off on the match until the Revolution pay-per-view in February.

"There was always going to be pressure on us to deliver in a match like that because there's not any more dream tag matches pretty much in wrestling anymore," Nick said. "We knew when we did this one that it has to be good. We actually tried to push the match back a little further. We were thinking more of our February pay-per-view (Revolution). But for whatever reason it didn't work out, we had to get it going. We did have to rush a lot of storytelling to get to Full Gear, but when it's all said and done and we look back at it now, I love that we did it then. The moment felt real, it felt special."

Matt then pointed out the monstrous expectations fans had for the match regardless of what the finished product looked like.

"It was really tough because here's this match people said was never going to happen and it was built for four or five years," Matt said. "So everybody's lofty expectations are already intimidating to you, and people expect so much out of everything. That's probably one reason why people were criticizing the build because in their minds they built it up to be something different, something else. Right out of the gate I told Nick, 'We're in trouble because no matter how good this match is, it's still not happening in front of 12,000 screaming fans. It's going to be in front of 1,000 socially distanced fans wearing masks in an outdoor arena where the weather is usually bad. Everything [that] could possibly be working against us or impairing the experience of watching said match, it was playing against us."

Matt then said the day of that match was the first time in his 17-year careers he had ever told his wife he was nervous for a match.

"That may have been the most proud I've been after a match, to overcome those odds," Matt added.