AEW hasn’t been getting a lot right with its recent creative, but credit where credit is due, the company got everything right with its presentation of MJF vs. Adam Cole on “Dynamite” on Wednesday.
Everything about the match – from how it was billed, as a championship eliminator match, to the sneaky 30-minute time limit that came into play later on, in a big way – was chef’s kiss perfect.
The championship eliminator format is usually something that I could do without, but its use here was to get you thinking that Cole, who has been the recipient of a nice push since returning from concussion issues earlier this spring, would end up getting the win, to set up a future title match.
The decision to start the show with the MJF-Cole match is also something that is usually something that I would criticize, basically because going with the main event at the top of the 8 p.m. ET hour seems counterproductive in terms of trying to goose the TV ratings, but doing that here maintained the mystery of how long the match was going to go.
Start the match at 9:30, and you know it’s going to the end of the show, right?
Start at 8, and who knows what the end game is, so, good decision there.
The match itself was pay-per-view quality, with MJF controlling the first 10 or so minutes with a mix of heelishness and good mat wrestling, Cole gaining control midway through, then the two going through a series of near-falls, ahead of a ref bump that set up a shocking conclusion.
MJF tried to use the ref bump to steal a DQ win by grabbing his world-title belt, flipping it to Cole, then falling flat on his back, expecting referee Bryce Remsburg to come to, see the belt in Cole’s hands, and call for the bell.
Which didn’t work, but things escalated from there, with both scoring excruciatingly close near-falls, ahead of a final sequence that saw Cole hit MJF with his Panama Sunrise followed by The Boom.
Just as Remsburg was about to hit the mat for the three-count that we had been led to believe was foreordained, the bell rang.
Time-limit draw.
What?
I have to admit, I hadn’t heard the 30-minute time limit called out before the match, so that one caught me off-guard.
And then, when Cole asked for a live mic and challenged MJF to go for “five more minutes,” what MJF did – grab his belt and slink away – that was also unexpected.
I thought up until he walked through the curtain that Tony Khan was going to come out from gorilla to tell Remsburg to ring the bell for the five more minutes, and that then we’d see MJF do something underhanded to score the fall.
MJF comes out of this unscathed ahead of his one-off pay-per-view match next week with Hiroshi Tanahashi, after which we can presume that Cole will get a build toward a rematch with MJF for either the “All In” show in London in August, or the “All Out” show on Labor Day weekend back in the States.
But first, Cole will almost certainly have to run some sort of gauntlet. That’s been how Khan has booked around MJF and Chris Jericho since launching AEW in 2019, and there’s no reason to expect him to deviate from that formula now.
As predictable as that is to foresee, Khan has things in motion for the top of the card heading into the summer, and he did it with one of the best TV matches we’ve seen this year.
Good work.
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Chris Graham
