WWE Reportedly Not Happy With Taz's Shoot Promo About COVID-19

During AEW's Fyter Fest event on Wednesday night, the company announced that the AEW World Championship match between Jon Moxley and Brian Cage had to be pushed out a week due to Moxley taking coronavirus precautions (his wife Renee Young tested positive last week, but as of now he hasn't). Taz and Brian Cage responded by coming out to the ring midway through the show to cut a promo, which saw the "Human Suplex Machine" take a shot across the bow at WWE for how they've handled the pandemic.

"And if you decided to get your ass here to work next week, you would get tested again here in AEW. Because Jon, as you know, we don't run a sloppy shop," Taz said.

According to Wrestling Observer's Dave Meltzer, WWE officials didn't care for that shot.

"Boy were there people upset with that line," Meltzer said on Wrestling Observer Radio. "How do you even argue it, right?"

Early last week reports of multiple WWE employees testing positive for COVID-19 started popping up, with Young, Adam Pearce, Jamie Noble and Kayla Braxton (for the second time) all stating publicly that they had tested positive. WWE has reportedly told wrestlers to comment on whether or not they have the virus, so the exact number of cases is unknown (though one report had the number as high as two dozen).

The pandemic wasn't the only excuse AEW had to take a shot at their competition. NXT opted to revive the Great American Bash brand for two episodes of television to run as direct competition to AEW's Fyter Fest. Since Dusty Rhodes created the brand and Cody Rhodes has stated openly he wants to get the show's trademark back, it came up during interviews leading up to the show.

"I'm not going to get angry because it still brings up his name in a positive way,"It's a unique marketing thing and I'm not really upset about it," Rhodes said while on Busted Open Radio. "I know my sister thought it was strange that it was announced willy-nilly and last minute. In the strangest of ways, I would hope that they do something special with it."

"I think our show is better. I think our show it will be better in execution, but I hope they do something special with it because I hated what Michael Hayes did with Starrcade," he added "He took a creation of my Dad's and made it a live event because they weren't selling any tickets in North Carolina and he wanted to save his job."