All Out started off surprisingly slow for me, and I still can’t put my finger on why. I don’t know if it’s because the show opened with a championship match that I ended up not liking nearly as much as I thought I would after the stupid Tailgate Brawl tornado tag to end the pre-show, but something about the start of the show just didn’t click. Fortunately, things turned out as I thought they would, but the slow start threw me off a bit. There was also a super unfortunate injury that threw things off for everyone, performers and fans alike.
Be that as it may, the matchup between Andrade El Idolo and the Pak National Championship wasn’t nearly as fast-paced and exciting as I’d hoped. I thought Andrade was retaining, so maybe another match should have been played instead, and this one will happen later. Maybe the AEW Trios Championships should have kicked off the night because that match was going to be big and awesome regardless of which team walked away as champions.
Then came Stephen Borden’s gruesome injury in a tag team match as he and Darby Allyn faced Kevin Knight and Kyle Fletcher to determine one contendership for the AEW World Tag Team Championships. A major injury like this is always something to hate, no matter who it happens to, but it was really unfortunate that it happened to Borden for his first billing on the big stage. The medical suspension really ruined the evening, through no one’s fault, and it certainly didn’t help the feel of the first part of the show.
The crowd was clearly trying to recover from the sight of Borden being stretchered off the field after the gruesome spot, and they fell silent at the start of TBS champion Persephone’s open challenge, which was answered by the debuting Dani Luna. The women worked hard to get the crowd into the match and they were great, but in the end Persephone retained the gold and a new star debuting only for them to lose is always pretty lame to me.
After the National Championship match, I had tempered my expectations for the International Championship bout with Kazuchika Okada defending against Tommaso Ciampa, which also got off to a slow start, but luckily, Willo Ciampa’s double-birds to Okada after he picked off an 8-year-old kid in the ring is pretty seriously where the show clinched for me. That was just the spot the crowd needed and the match got extremely heated after that. AEW almost always beats their pay-per-views, which thankfully they did tonight, but the start of the show left me a little worried.
Posted by Daisy Ruth
