Cardinal rule in pro wrestling booking: your world champ doesn’t get pinned in a tag match unless you’re advancing a storyline.
So you could say, then, that AEW world champ Chris Jericho getting pinned as “Dynamite” was going off the air was a huge mistake.
Jericho was teaming up with Sammy Guevara in a match with tag champs SoCal Uncensored in the main event of “Dynamite” last night.
The match started late, late, late: around 9:45 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes until the hard 10 p.m. Eastern cutoff from TNT.
Ring announcer Justin Roberts introduced the match as having a 60-minute time limit, which you have to do to make it come across as legit.
The TV broadcast crew – I can’t remember if it was Jim Ross, Tony Schiavone or Excalibur, but one of them – said during the match if proceedings extended beyond 10 p.m., then the finish would be made available via YouTube later.
Not sure anybody would buy that. I didn’t, anyway.
“Dynamite” isn’t “Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling” at noon on Saturday, or “World Wide Wrestling” airing after the news on Saturday night.
Plus, AEW tapes its web series “After Dark” after “Dynamite” goes off the air. They wouldn’t want to screw with the timing for that.
And so it was, with roughly three minutes to go until the 10 p.m. cutoff, that Guevara made a hot tag to Jericho, then got knocked out of the ring and to the floor.
This left Jericho without a way out as the seconds ticked down toward 10 p.m.
Scorpio Sky rolled up Jericho in an inside cradle to get the 1-2-3 with maybe 20 seconds left in the broadcast.
Jericho responded the way a heel champ should in such a situation, basically tearing up the ringside area in frustration as the credits rolled.
There was probably a bit of realism to the frustration there.
A Jericho pinfall loss, even in a tag match, should mean something to the person getting the fall.
Unless AEW is signaling to us that Scorpio Sky is destined for a run as a main-event singles guy, this was just a botch.
Guevara needed to be in the ring to take that fall, to put SCU over, and keep Jericho clean in the process.
Probably a rookie mistake on the part of Guevara that no doubt got him chewed out backstage afterward.
Story by Chris Graham
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