Jericho starts off by mocking the code of honour with AEW’s
favourite gesture – the middle finger.
They do a really nice job of highlighting Bandido’s strengths as a
wrestler which is bread and butter for any debut match. It starts off simple enough with a suicide
dive, but the dives and topes increase with rotations and difficulty as things
progress. That might not seem so special
for your modern day luchador, but when he starts breaking out the moves that put
over how physically strong he is, you see another side to his game. I was surprised to see the one-handed gorilla
press used during the first commercial break to a limited audience, but that was to be quickly dwarfed
when they came back to TV and Bandido pulled out the 1 minute delayed vertical
suplex to rush all the blood and vodka to Jericho’s head. Philly stopped counting after 30 seconds but
they popped big when Jericho was finally planted to the canvas.
At 51 years old, Jericho is never going to hit the
codebreaker or lionsault with the same smoothness as he used to, but he’s
experienced enough to lay out matches that work well and improvise when an opportunity
arises. When Bandido starts to bleed
through his white mask, Jericho’s smart enough to target it with some knees or
punches during the transition of the match’s bigger moves which I always
appreciate. Jericho’s also good at
linking movesets together – I particularly enjoyed Bandido countering Jericho’s
corner dropkick into a middle rope sunset flip powerbomb, but also the X-Knee being
reversed into the Walls of Jericho was a great spot too. Some things didn’t always come off looking
great, the crucifix bomb was rough around the edges, but nothing that hurt the
match. I joked when the match was
announced that surely the Spanish Fly-Fallaway Slam wasn’t going to happen in
this match, but here I am with egg on my face because those crazy bastards went
for it. It wasn’t picture perfect, but
no-one died!
The 2nd attempt of the X-Knee connects and it’s followed up
by the 21-Plex but Jericho survives it.
Sigh. Once again Bandido feels
the need to every big move he has, even when he’s losing. If the rumours are true that he’s been
offered a full time deal with AEW, then I would have liked to see a bit of restraint
here as I’ve already seen the big Bandido match on day 1 so where do you go
from there. The same exact moves in the
same order against Fenix? Probably. As
with a lot of 2022 Jericho matches where the going gets too tough, he has to
resort to cheating so with a poke of the eye and a tug of the mask, he finds
himself locking in the liontamer on Bandido.
The commentary team do a great job of pointing out that Bandido’s mask is
now covering his eyes and with Jericho’s knee on his head he can’t see how
close to the ropes he is so he feels the need to tap out. Really
good TV main event and first defence for Jericho, but I’m not sure I got my ‘something different’ out of
Bandido.
After the match Jericho cut a promo setting him up to face
other former ROH World Champions in the future.
I was surprised to see him set up a match with Danielson so soon as that
felt like a natural end point of this Jericho title run, but maybe that’ll end
up being Daniel Garcia. I do find it a
bit petty that they’re calling Chris Jericho the most famous ROH Champion ever,
and then when listing names of former champions they leave off the name CM
Punk. Regardless, Tony Khan should make
the call to Low Ki for a one off appearance.
I’m good without seeing the Dalton Castle and Jay Lethal matches against
Jericho – give the people what they want from this program.
Ed
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