Featured image by Mayito Photos
There’s a moment in this match where Damien 666 is battering Ciclope with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. One can see from the footage that there’s an explosive hooked up to the bat as well. Yet when Damien hits Ciclope with the bat, no explosion. Damien gives it a couple good swings but still nothing. I assumed it was a small hiccup in what had already been a really great match so far.
But then Ciclope mounts a comeback, he gets the bat, and makes it burst onto Damien 666. Hell yeah. I’m not going to sit here and tell you if that was a botch they recovered from or an actual planned spot. No one knows but those men in the ring. What I can say is that it was much more satisfying having that explosion come as part of a comeback than it might have been in a heat segment.
Also, after that spot, Ciclope straps an explosive charge to his knee and hits an exploding Shining Wizard.
That’s what I love about this match, outside of just the fireworks. There’s a lot of moments where things just fall into place either by design or happenstance. For example, at what point in the match, the ring explodes. Or at least, that’s what the four booms from the corner turnbuckles tries to convey. While the explosions looked decent enough, seeing everyone downed in the ring from them felt a bit too much to believe. That would have been a bit of a damp ending despite not sinking to the absolute depths of the AEW Revolution explosion fiasco.
But to my surprise, the ring explosion doesn’t end things. We get two more excellent explosion spots that serve as far better endpoints for the match as a whole. Little surprises like that do a lot to bolster this match in my eyes.
Enough of that though. You’ve seen the thumbnail on the show. You maybe saw the GIF that went viral of Lobo Blanco hitting a tope con gilo with explosives strapped to his back. We all know why this match rules. Things go boom and they go boom good. Deathmatches of this kind operate best when putting all the emphasis on pure spectacle and we got that here. The barbed wire ropes explode in the first minute, and it’s really only uphill from there. There’s even explosions at points where you might not be expecting them.
Little booms, big booms, all the booms go boom and I fucking love it. Easily one of the best deathmatches of the year already simply for delivering on its premise, and doing it so damn well.
This fucking rocks. Don’t skip it.
