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In this AEW Dynamite 6/8/22 review, I share thoughts on Jon Moxley vs. Kyle O’Reilly in the main event and the continued build to Forbidden Door.
You can listen above or via your favorite podcast app or read the show notes below. The main highlights are also available via the transcript below.
Show Notes
- Jon Moxley earning his shot at the Interim AEW World title at Forbidden Door
- Kyle O’Reilly winning the battle royal
- AEW introducing the All Atlantic title
- Wardlow revealing his next goal
- Will Ospreay making his first AEW appearance
- A potential Thunder Rosa vs. Toni Storm feud
For more AEW discussion, you can follow me on Twitter @wrestleblake.
Transcript
It is the AEW Dynamite 6/8/22 review, as that’s the focus on this episode of All Elite Daily.
And as we said going into it, a lot of the talk would be surrounding the two big matches that we’re going to take place on Dynamite. That involved the Battle Royale to determine who would face Jon Moxley in the main event, and as expected, it is going to be Jon Moxley headed to Forbidden Door to take on the winner of Hiroshi Tanahashi and Hirooki Goto.
But a lot of other noteworthy stuff came out of AEW Dynamite. One, in particular, is actually going to be the focus of our Friday episode. We’ll get to that here in just a second. But let’s start with the main theme, which was the Interim AEW World Championship and look at the possibilities.
That’s where we start things off by looking at the Casino Battle Royale. There were a lot of things about the battle royale that stood out. I think one of the things immediately was something that we talked about – the injury situation for AEW right now. That is looking at guys like CM Punk, of course, who is out. Bryan Danielson has been sidelined for at least a week or two now. Adam Cole, as we’ve said before, is expected not to wrestle until Forbidden Door. Then as we will also discuss, they had a different direction for Wardlow.
So some of your top stars were not in this Battle Royale. And I think that made it kind of interesting from the standpoint of going back to the AEW rankings. I’ve said from the start, I think rankings are a good idea. But there are many times when they limit you more than help you.
I think this is one of those situations where people have been ingrained to pay attention to these rankings. But yet, when you have a Battle Royale like this, you don’t really feel like there’s a lot of people in here necessarily that are at the top of those rankings.
Eddie Kingston, I thought, had the biggest reaction of anyone. And I think there is money to be made there with an eventual Eddie Kingston title run. I don’t know when that’s gonna happen. But you want to talk about what I think would probably be one of the biggest pops that AEW could have from its fan base right now – I think that would be the moment that Eddie Kingston wins a world championship. But that’s a story for another podcast.
You did have Kingston, you had Darby Allin, you had Rey Fenix, you had Swerve and Keith Lee. They had their interaction and there was Swerve eliminating Lee. I don’t know what that means moving forward for their their team, but that was something that was notable in there as well. Konosuke Takeshita was in there. He was involved. And again, he’s someone who I think has come in and impressed. I think he’s done a good job.
There were other guys that were in there. Wheeler Yuta got a good reaction. Andrade was the final entrant. And I thought at that point, Andrade would actually be the one that would win. I did start to believe that because I think that would have made sense. But it just didn’t happen.
And they decided instead to go with Kyle O’Reilly, who I’ve said, I think is really one of the most underrated guys in wrestling in terms of his in-ring ability. Everyone knows that Kyle O’Reilly can go in the ring, but he hasn’t necessarily always gotten that main event opportunity. We know what he accomplished in NXT. Recency bias is a thing, and I think with O’Reilly, the way he finished his run in NXT, was just sort of the cool character and all this other stuff he was playing. It just did not feel like what fans wanted from Kyle O’Reilly.
But when you look at what he’s done in AEW thus far, he’s had a hell of a run. He looked great in that match, most recently, at Double or Nothing against Darby Allin. I thought that was a fantastic match for one that was just thrown together, seemingly out of nowhere to put on pay-per-view. I thought it was really good.
So O’Reilly winning was basically nothing more than it’s just a means to an end. Yes, perhaps if you loaded this Battle Royale up a bit more with what felt like top challengers, maybe you could have made it a little more appealing to put some doubt in people’s minds that it wasn’t going to be Jon Moxley winning the main event. But I mean, like it or not, once O’Reilly won, it made it very clear that it’s gonna be Jon Moxley winning.
At the very least, you get a good main event and I felt the main event was great. These two were gonna beat the hell out of each other. They did, and it was a fantastic main event.
That was just sort of the role that this Battle Royale served was to get Jon Moxley from point A to point B and this served its purpose no matter who won. It was good for O’Reilly, I think gives him a little bit more of a push. He’s beaten Darby Allin, he’s won this Battle Royale. He’s been someone that Tony Khan has certainly put a lot of faith in and yeah, he’s delivering in the ring. So it was nice to see Kyle O’Reilly kind of getting some recognition here.
But again, it’s like, how many battle royals do you really look back on and say, “Oh, that was just a great battle royal that is so memorable.” There’s not a ton. Battle royals are what they are.
I’m not a huge fan of the Casino Battle Royale style. I don’t love the concept. You’re just putting a lot of guys in the ring. And that’s what you did here. When you don’t have the star power you would expect maybe going in just based on the rankings, it just becomes a battle royal. There was not a lot of memorable stuff coming out of it…..
Listen to the full “AEW Dynamite 6/8/22 Review: Jon Moxley, All Atlantic Title, More” episode of All Elite Daily below.
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