I’m quite looking forward to “Forbidden Door” pay-per-view on Sunday night (8 p.m. ET), not so much for the three multi-man interpromotional tag matches – seriously, we need three of those? – as for the two New Japan star vs. AEW star matches and the world-title main event.
How do those go – in particular, the main event, Swerve Strickland defending his AEW world title against Will Ospreay, the guy that Tony Khan signed to a huge deal with the obvious intent to make him one of the company’s top stars?
Wrestling writers like to say they’re predicting how the show will go.
I’ll just go ahead and admit here, what we’re really doing is saying how we’d do it, if we had the book.
With that in mind …
The most important match: the last one
The hard part to any AEW pay-per-view is how damned long they are. The show starts with a zero hour around 7 p.m. ET, and goes right up to midnight – and the last one, “Double or Nothing,” went past midnight all the way to 12:32 in the a.m. for those of us on the East Coast.
Strickland didn’t fare so well against that backdrop. His defense against Christian Cage was just 24:50 of sleep-inducing meh.
To be frank, his title reign, which only dates back to his April 21 win in the main event at “Dynasty” over Samoa Joe, has been a constant stream of meh.
You wouldn’t blame Khan for taking the belt off Strickland tomorrow night, but no, that’s not going to happen.
Khan is, instead, going to use the match with Ospreay to detach Ospreay from heel manager Don Callis, by having Callis cost Ospreay the win somehow, probably intentionally, to turn Ospreay face.
I’m fine with that, as long as we get the rare double-turn out of this one, with Strickland also turning heel, so that he can start rebuilding what it was that got him momentum in the first place.
Khan likes to turn his top heels face (see: MJF), not getting it that it’s better for business to have a top heel doing heel things on the mic, in the ring, whatever, and having the top faces chase them to seek retribution.
He’ll have to, eventually, turn MJF and even Ospreay back to the heel side, but if he does it right – a big if with Khan – he’d do so one guy at a time, to allow the focus to be on that one guy at a time.
Strickland has the ability to carry the company at least into “All In” as the top heel, and then you can have a defined top heel in Strickland defend against hometown hero face Ospreay in Wembley, put the belt on Ospreay, and build toward what’s next thereafter.
There are too many layers in what I’ve laid out there for Khan to be able to bring to reality, unfortunately.
Bryan Danielson vs. Shingo Takagi
The booking here is simple: put Shingo Takagi over.
Bryan Danielson is retiring in a couple of months. This is another in his series of dream retirement matches, which he deserves.
Guys retiring need to put the younger guys over, though Takagi, at 41, isn’t necessarily a younger guy (Danielson is 43).
I can see Khan stealing Takagi away from New Japan for a run in AEW. If that is going to be the case, give him a win over Danielson before he signs.
Jon Moxley vs. Tetsuya Naito
Another easy one: put Tetsuya Naito over.
The G1 Climax tournament starts on July 20, and New Japan needs a domestic champ back before that gets under way.
Khan’s raid of NJPW has taken away a ton of its talent, and the shame is, he’s not used the guys that he lured away with the family money all that well.
If I’m New Japan, I demand that this one be a squash win for Naito, as payback, but then, admittedly, I can tend toward vindictiveness.
The match of the night: Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Orange Cassidy
I’m a huge Jim Cornette podcast fan, but two things he gets way, way, way wrong are ZSJ and Orange Cassidy, “The Human Q Tip” and “My Little Dog Pockets,” in Corny lore.
ZSJ is the most unique top of the midcard guy in the business today, working a realism-based submission style, and Cassidy is a close second, as a slacker who can work and also can put his opponents’ moves over at a near-elite level.
I don’t care who wins this one; I’d just book it to give them 30 minutes, and tell them to tear the house down.
And I’d put these guys on first on the main show, to set the tone for the night.
The other match that deserves mention: MJF vs. Hechicero
How I’d book this one is, I’d have the announcers cut in with breaking news about an attack in the locker room, cue the cameras on the scene, showing Hechicero laid out, and then I’d book a segment for MJF that has him cutting a 12-minute-long promo on Tony Khan blistering him for not knowing how to do his damn job, basically making him a 2024 “Stone Cold” Steve Austin taking on Vince McMahon.
In the process, this forces Khan to become the heel promoter, which, come on, he needs to just own it already, that the dwindling base of AEW fans has long since been frustrated with his hubris in thinking he needs to be more than the money man in the company he’s built using his father’s money.
Going this route makes the storylines on TV mirror that reality, and also gets us out of the stupid Young Bucks vs. Khan storyline that isn’t going anywhere anyway.
Seriously, though, since we’re not going to see that, wasting MJF in front of the hometown crowd with a guy from CMLL that no one north of the border has heard of or cares about is wrestling promoter malpractice on the part of Tony Khan, to the point that we should be able to file a class-action lawsuit against him and AEW just for making us think about this match, with treble damages if we have to then watch it.
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Chris Graham
