AEW Dynamite (June 29th, 2022): BLUE-D AND GOOTS TOO! Now With More Claudio.

So, Forbidden Door has come and gone. Heard it was a great show with some great wrestling. I didn't watch it because I didn't care enough to order the PPV on the strength of good wrestling alone since that would be akin to giving a kid a participation trophy for showing up for softball practice. Good wrestling - even great wrestling - is not something that is lacking in good supply these days and I was more than content to fill the void with virtually anything else... as was the case when I posted yesterday's weekly PPV musings.

Now Blood And Guts II on the other hand? THAT piqued my interest.

It's rare for me to witness a good, bloody Wargames style match and the few that I watched back in the day have always been a fun spectacle of violence until I got the DVD comp that collected all of them, which is where I started to truly enjoy the match concept as a whole. So it's the second ever AEW Blood & Guts match and this one has fucking CLAUDIO. What could possibly go right?

By the way, I only watched the main event. There was some stuff with FTR and the demon clown guy, but I didn't watch that stuff.

Yes, so for anyone who missed it, CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI debuted at that Door PPV and beat a New Japan guy, going on to take Bryan Danielson's place in the Club for the main event. And I'll be honest and assume that a lot of what Claudio got here was going to be for Bryan had he not gotten hurt, particularly the finish which saw both Eddie and Claudio trapping Jericho and one of the 2.0 guys in submissions and Claudio ended up tapping the other guy, robbing Eddie of his much wanted vindication over Jericho. Not that I'm complaining about Eddie Kingston seems to hate all the really successful former indy guys because they're all apparently pricks or something. Can't say I blame him; the more successful and highly regarded you are, the more likely you are to become more of a dick.

Aside from that, this was a fantastic cage match. Everyone got their little moment to shine, a whole bunch of plunder was used here and there, Sammy took a giant fall off the cage and into the table because we really needed one of those, a lot of blood was spilled (guts not so much - I guess that'd be too gruesome for TBS), a whole lot of violence and wanton destruction of rings was on display... you know what? Keep your Forbidden Door and your six-star rasslin that would've been seven or eight had it been in the Tokyo Dome and Meltzer would've been slobbering over that shit. THIS, right here, is what I was looking forward to the most and it delivered in SPADES.

Oh yeah, the Combat Club won the match. This six-man war. Where do we go from here? Maybe we can have a sports entertainment match next. I can't speak for the first hour of Dynamite - my DVR got whacked for some reason and forgot to record the show - but that second hour with WARGAMES BLUED AND GOOTS was fantastic, beautiful violence. If this had been on PPV, you would've had my money. But it was on free TV and this felt like a steal. And in this case, it was a good steal.

Next week, I expect a nice clean show... I'm probably not going to get that. Oh well...