Write Forever: Too Many Death Riders on AEW Collision for September 19

It's a Collision! And it's a night where multiple Special Little Guys of mine get title shots that they will most certainly lose. Will I maintain hope anyway, like a stupid idiot? Of course!

Today we bopped around to a bunch of garage sales and I guess the guy running the last one we stopped at thought we looked cool, because he told us about his invite-only weekly movie club where he plays 16mm and laserdisc movies for a small group of people. I am very excited to see a movie and probably not get murdered.

But before I probably don't get murdered, it's time to watch some pro-wrestling!

There are mistakes being made with Darby Allin

I'll preface this all by saying I don't dislike watching Darby Allin wrestle. I think his matches are generally good, even if some of them tend to feel somewhat samey after a while.

But putting the TNT Title on Darby Allin feel like a mistake to me. I understand that they wanted to get more juice out of this Darby/Kevin Knight feud. However, they also left a lot of meat on the bone of the Speedball Mike Bailey/Kevin Knight feud.

Of course, they wanted to build to Darby/Knight at All In. But, why did it need to be for the TNT Title? Couldn't we just have easily put the title on Bailey weeks earlier due to Darby Allin interfering to counteract some Don Callis Family interference?

This would have taken the belt off of Knight in a way that continues the feud with Darby and put the belt on someone who is super over all of the time and always has great matches. The All In match with Darby and Knight still has heat behind it because Knight can blame Darby for costing him the belt, so we still get all of the Sting/Steven Borden stuff.

Right now, Darby having the TNT Title does nothing for Steven Borden – especially considering their post-match promo making it clear that they're gunning for the Tag Team Titles.

AEW missed another opportunity to move the TNT Title off of Darby tonight by having Darby go over Myron Reed. I never expected Myron to win, really, but he's a guy I've liked for a long, long time and it would have been a neat shock to the system.

You could have, once again, allowed DCF interference to cost Darby the title in a way that continues that whole storyline while (again, importantly) moving the TNT Title off of a guy who doesn't need it at all right now.

It all just feels a little rinse and repeat for me, and with the wealth of men's singles titles and great singles wrestlers on the roster there's no reason to treat some of these belts with a more hot potato mentality to boost up some of the newer and/or younger guys in the company.

Hey, where the fuck did this Zayda Steel come from?

I've seen a lot of Zayda Steel in ROH and AEW since she got signed, and she never really caught my eye. Something always just seemed to be missing for me. Some sense of urgency or something in the ring that just held her back from standing out to me.

That all went out the window in her match with Thekla tonight.

In what could have been a quick squash for Thekla to build to her match with Willow Nightingale at All Out, Zayda instead got to show that she has improved a ton since joining AEW and stood on equal footing with Thekla.

What changed and when is a mystery, and it shouldn't be difficult to have a good match with Thekla, but Steel's performance tonight was easily her best since joining the company and caught me quite off-guard.

I hope she can keep the momentum up and keep having matches of this caliber in the future and that this wasn't just an anomaly of being in the ring with an incredible wrestler.

I'll also note that I was absolutely living for the small child in the crowd screaming support for Thekla throughout this match.

This show had way too many Death Riders

I like Danny Garcia.

I like Wheeler Yuta.

I like PAC.

But god damn this show had way too much Death Rider shit all over it. Tony Schiavone even got spooked at the end of the show when they played the wrong music for Mox's win, then started playing the actual Death Riders' theme and he thought the Death Riders were about to come out!

And main eventing it with Jon Moxley in an Eliminator Match against Zachary Wentz instead of main eventing with Andrade/Garcia or Darby/Myron? Just a ludicrous decision.

I am hoping upon hope that Moxley drops the Continental Champion before the C2 because I really don't need another "Mox runs through everyone" Continental Classic this year.

Please, just do something different with the belt and the tournament.

Wrapping Up

I don't know what they did with the desk chairs but Nigel looked like an eleven year-old boy sitting between Tall Paul and Tony tonight. I also can't tell if Nigel is pretending to be annoyed by Tall Paul yelling into his ear or if he's just very, very good at his job.

Andrade and Daniel Garcia had a pretty good match with perhaps a few too many shenanigans for my taste. It also had a weird ending that didn't play as well on TV as I think they thought it would. There wasn't quite enough of a visual shift in the small package for it to be super clear that they had traded positions on the small package.

Wheeler Yuta and Mike Bailey had an excellent wrestling match that was only undercut by it not really having any stakes or meaning behind it. I mean, I'm not one to complain about getting good matches really but both of these guys are so damn good that they could and should be doing something more consequential on the shows.

Overall, a fine episode of televised professional wrestling but one that I think was booked in the wrong order. End the show with a triumphant Darby and Steven Borden cutting a fiery, post-match babyface promo instead of the same plodding Moxley/Death Riders junk.