AEW Full Gear has come and gone. The show was packed to the gills with matches, moments, and, since this is wrestling, winners and losers. The following article will not be dealing with the literal "Winners" and "Losers" as that's what our fastidious results page is for. This will instead talk about who came out looking good, and who looks like they have a long and narrow way to redemption.
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Some winners were literal losers, like QT Marshall, more on that later, and in some cases, the loser will be a concept or maybe even an idea, such as the TNT Title itself, which like I said, more on that later. This ended up being a mild meditation on wrestling in general and how AEW Full Gear reflected the highs and lows of the current product.
Enough pontificating, let's get down to the heart of the matter. I don't think anyone will be shocked by the first winner.
QT Marshall will go down in the history books for his match with Big Boom AJ on Saturday night, full stop. While AJ came prepared to deliver a simple, entertaining match in the Zero Hour pre-show, Marshall did a truly monumental job directing traffic and delivering what I personally might consider the match of the year.
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Let's break this down, an almost-was independent wrestler has found success elsewhere by making videos with his son and their little friend The Rizzler. The popularity puts him back in touch with an old wrestling contact who not only brings him in for a match, but brings Big Justice and The Rizzler along. Not only does AJ have the kind of match most retired independent wrestlers dream of, a big win in front of an actual f***ing arena, but he doesn't just do it in front of his son, his son delivered a crisp, beautiful spear to set his father up for the win, while The Rizzler managed to hit his Rizzler face with laserlike understanding of when the camera was on him. It was, bar none, one of the most wholesome, entertaining matches in the history of wrestling.
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I am being completely earnest, heart on my sleeve and my soul open wide, when I say it was a truly perfect moment, the kind that professional wrestling was meant to be.It really is beautiful what this great sport we love can be, when we let it.
I will leave you with the words of Bob Dylan, who has begun tweeting as of late.
"Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings 'We've all had too much sorrow, now it the time for joy.' I was thinking to myself, yeah that's about right." That is about right, and QT Marshall vs. Big Boom AJ was nothing but joy.
The AEW TBS Championship Match between Kris Statlander and Mercedes Mone on Saturday was touted as the longest women's match in AEW history, with Tony Khan claiming the match clocked in at "over 20 minutes." The only problem with Khan's vague estimate is that the match was, by all accounts, 19min 25sec. Possibly the longest match in AEW women's division history but not "over 20 minutes."
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We'll see on Wednesday if that lore stands but I take a certain amount of heart in the pushback to the recent influx of statistic-analysis and conversations about match-length, as if an art like professional wrestling can actually be measured by things as concrete as numbers. You can't rank a feeling and looking at a painting for 10 minutes can be as rewarding as watching 10 hours of a TV show. Wrestling is not a real sport, no matter how much people want to play Moneyball with it anyway. In some instances, it can be as futile as trying to gamify writing a poem, you can technically do it but it usually ends up a soulless exercise.
Mercedes Mone vs. Kris Statlander didn't feel important because it took somewhere around 20 minutes. It felt important because Mone and Statlander used their time to make it feel important. It scratched an itch, and sometimes scratching an itch takes three seconds, and sometimes that takes "20 minutes," even if it's actually 19 minutes and 20 seconds.
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Hangman Page is seemingly bulletproof. When he loses, he spirals, when he spirals, he's so entertaining that even in losing he still finds his way into the show-closing angle of a PPV that, again, he lost on.
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There is a case to be made for Hangman being the closest thing that AEW has to a protagonist and Saturday was just more proof of that. He's Roman Reigns with rage issues, even MJF feels like he's been back-burnered by injuries and movie shoots, Page is seemingly always at the center of the show. He's also one of the rare cases in all of current wrestling where his rising tide truly lifts all ships around him. Jay White's victory and his thwarting of Christian Cage's contract cash-in keep "Switchblade" in a similarly central place. Swerve Strickland is completely extricated from Hangman's orbit but still feels like a substantial talent thanks to the inner strength he showed in their feud earlier this year.
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While people like Darby Allin and Daniel Garcia seem to be fighting hardest for the soul of AEW, there was a part of me who saw Hangman Page in that ring and wondered, if in fighting for AEW, could Hangman win back his soul. He's certainly in the orbit.
The AEW World Title scene feels pretty full. Jon Moxley, Darby Allin, Christian Cage, Jay White, Hangman Page, there are a lot of people orbiting that title and it seems like MJF is off in his own corner of the solar system. I'd say Adam Cole is there too but this feud between MJF and Adam Cole has already begun to spiral off into its own convoluted orbit. Adam Cole spent weeks cutting promos on MJF, which ultimately led to a match between MJF and...Roderick Strong, for reasons. I know that stories can be stretched out but now that Kyle O'Reilly seems to be involved, it's like they just keep adding things to the mix and it runs the risk of picking up too much mass and grinding to a halt.
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Maybe the upcoming Continental Classic will be where things are taken from here, or maybe we just get many more weeks of Adam Cole cutting promos followed by a pre-taped 15 seconds of MJF acting angry at a TV screen we can't see. Even if this does eventually end, where does either man go from here? Daniel Garcia and the TNT Championship? Takeshita and the International Championship? There are plenty of titles but I can't help but feel like this feud is a lost cause that should've been left in 2023.
