AEW did it, they put on the biggest professional wrestling show in history. A nearly sold out Wembley Stadium full of screaming fans for All In London. There was much ado about the card but in the end, how was the actual event? Let’s dive right into it, starting with:
CM Punk vs. Samoa Joe
This match was incredible. An absolutely smash hit right off the bat, this was a rivalry decades in the making. Joe was the absolute right choice for CM Punk’s return program and this was a great blowoff. There was no turning back the clock needed for these two, these aren’t the ROH days anymore. Two greats in the Twilight of their careers beating the living daylights out of each other in front of 80,000 people. Much like Punk’s match with Kojima, which I covered here, this is a hard hitting belter of a match and really sets the stage for the PPV to come
9/10
Bullet Club Gold (Jay White and Juice Robinson) with Konosuke Takeshita vs. The Golden Elite (Kenny Omega, Kota Ibushi, “Hangman” Adam Page)
This one was okay! I had no real opinion on the whole “should Kenny Omega have a singles match on the biggest wrestling show ever” debate because to me it doesn’t matter. The build to this match was a mix of the current Don Callis Family storyline, which has been a bit shaky in my opinion, and Jay White’s unresolved Bullet Club lore with Kenny Omega, so going in I had no real strong opinions other than “well at least I’ll get to see Konosuke and Kenny wrestle.”
As for the match itself ,it’s a solid trios, a lot of good offensive showings from both teams. Kota Ibushi looked a lot better here than at Blood and Guts last month. This match serves mostly to set up Omega vs. Takeshita at All Out and leave the back door open for more Elite vs. Bullet Club shenanigans in the future. A perfectly serviceable match with a story I personally wasn’t particularly interested in.
7/10
AEW Tag Team Championship: FTR (Cash Wheeler and Dax Harwood) vs. The Young Bucks (Matt Jackson and Nick Jackson)
Is this the first ever time I get to talk about FTR on the review series? What an excellent tag team. They’ve had a fantastic last couple of months and I’ve been really enjoying their tag team run. I was really looking forward to this match, because the last couple times they’ve run this it was great, but this one felt off. There was a point around the middle where the match just stalled. It seemed sluggish, which is bizarre because FTR was able to pace a match 3 times this length without that happening. Despite the weirdness, however, it was still a really fun match. seeing both team’s offensive styles clash like this is always a treat.
8/10 (with an extra point because Shatter Machine is my favorite tag team finisher and I got to see it multiple times)
Stadium Stampede: Best Friends (Chuck Taylor and Trent Beretta), Orange Cassidy, Eddie Kingston, and Penta El Zero Miedo vs. Blackpool Combat Club (Jon Moxley, Claudio Castagnoli, and Wheeler Yuta), Santana and Ortiz
Yes! Yes! Yes! There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that I love more than a big ugly deathmatch. I’ve grown a bit disillusioned with the Stadium Stampede style of big arena brawls, mostly because the action is always a bit frantic. It doesn’t feel like it works as well as pandemic era shows where there was no crowd and you can shoot around the action. Constant cutting between different people in different areas doing different spots, all live, means sometimes action gets missed, for example when they switched to another camera as Penta was about to land a chair shot.
All complaints aside, this match was fantastic. The throughline of Kingston vs Moxley is a great story and adding 8 other people I’m a fan of is a winning strategy. All you really need to do to get me gushing about a match is let Jon Moxley go out there and do even 20% of what he would do in a deathmatch against Desperado. Skewers, glass covered fists, Sue handing over a tray of cookies to use as an offensive weapon, this match has it all. Of all the Stadium Stampede and Anarchy in the Arena type matches, this one is easily my favorite. An absolute joy top to bottom.
What especially got me me was Penta El Zero Miedo being taken away and coming back as Penta Oscuro, the legally distinct Lucha Underground Pentagon Dark gimmick tied to House of Black that went nowhere last year. What popped me even more was that he was not even wearing said legally distinct Lucha Underground Pentagon Dark outfit, instead going for an all red ensemble. I love wrestling so much.
10/10
AEW Women’s World Championship: Hikaru Shida vs. Saraya vs. Britt Baker vs. Toni Storm
I understand how we got here. Jamie Hayter was injured, she wasn’t going to make the PPV, I get it. Still, this felt like such a nothing match. Shida got a title reign in front of fans and it lasted a few weeks. It seems they’re going to continue the Baker and Saraya feud. The match match was short at only 8 minutes. The Outcasts breaking up is a shame, because they never really got going on anything with them, but I do think it’s for the best. It is also nice that Saraya gets a big moment in her home country in front of 80,000 fans.
4/10
Coffin Match: Darby Allin and Sting vs. Swerve Strickland and Christian Cage
I really enjoyed the build to this match. The Swerve vs Mogul Embassy stuff has been a lot of fun recently, barring the absolutely bizarre choice to have Swerve turn against AR Fox. Adding in Christian seems odd, but I’m not complaining. Swerve was great as always, and these 4 put on a fun coffin match. Sting did his obligatory big spot and the match finished at a brisk 16 minutes.
8/10
Will Ospreay vs. Chris Jericho
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this match. Will Ospreay isn’t someone that I’m very excited about and Chris Jericho is solid, but he’s not my favorite. Add in that this is building the Don Callis Family storyline, which I’m pretty blase on, and I don’t have a ton to say about this one. It’s a good match, though, don’t get me wrong. Jericho was working hard to bring back his old style against Ospreay and it really worked for both men. This match felt like a quick sprint and both of them worked off each other really well.
8/10
AEW World Trios Championship: The Acclaimed (Max Caster, Anthony Bowens) w/ “Badass” Billy Gunn vs. The House of Black (Malakai Black, Buddy Matthews, and Brody King)
This one was bizarre. I really enjoyed their match at Double or Nothing but that one was also incredibly short. Like in that match, just when it seemed like it was picking up, it was over. I like both teams and it is an extreme bummer that they only got to fight each other for 10 minutes before House of Black dropped the belts. Especially because it seemed like they were building towards an LFI vs. HoB feud and I would have loved to see LFI take the belts off of House of Black. But Brody King is injured, so this does make sense.
6/10
AEW World Championship: MJF vs. Adam Cole
I’ve made it clear in my reviews that I am full steam ahead on the MJF train. His matches are great, I love his week to week programs, it’s all a lot of fun. I’ve (mostly) been enjoying his program with Adam Cole and the big elephant of the room of “which of these two newfound friends will turn on each other first”. I just wish they didn’t do it so early in the match.
This bout followed a similar cadence to other MJF matches, which would be fine if the plot hadn’t changed so much over the past month. This is an MJF teetering on the verge of becoming Babyface. It doesn’t feel quite right to keep working this very heel style. The double clothesline double pin spot was a lot of fun, but doing the Eddie Guerrero DQ spot immediately after was an odd choice. As much as I think that this is one of MJF’s weaker title defenses, however, something finally clicked watching this. The way Max works, his mannerisms, the way he does his moves, it’s all very Looney Tunes. Adam Cole outsmarting him on the Eddie Guerrero spot by lying down and then MJF resignedly wrapping a chair around his head and lying down as well is such a Daffy Duck move and it’s a very unique style, which is why I think it sticks with me so well.
This was not my favorite MJF defense, but not everyone can be Bryan Danielson. To see how far MJF has come in such a relatively short time, from jerking the curtain at the Biggest Independent Wrestling Show Ever to closing it on the Biggest Wrestling Event Ever was genuinely great.
9/10
Closing Thoughts
How does the biggest wrestling event ever fare? Pretty good, all things considered. There was only one match that I thought was actively bad. The rest were all good to great matches, worthy of the biggest day in this company’s history. All In is absolutely worth your time and probably my favorite AEW PPV this year, if not my favorite wrestling PPV of this year.
9/10
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