I know I shouldn’t be complaining about the Buy In pre-show on Double or Nothing, but even with two matches, it just felt so incredibly long that the ridiculously FTW Championship match would have been an excellent fit for it. Even though I wasn’t a fan of the match to begin with, at least the Buy In would have been more interesting with this zany stuff. Overall, I hated the fact that Chris Jericho walked away with the championship, even though I predicted that to begin with. The belt in itself is extremely silly, especially since AEW has a million and a half belts, especially with Ring of Honor. All these guys — HOOK, Big Bill, Shibata, Bryan Keith — getting pulled into Chris Jericho’s vortex just kills me. They deserve so much better than being attached to a dying act in the company. When HOOK first started tagging with Jericho, it was immediate cringe for me, and it just hasn’t gotten any better.

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I thought the match in itself was pretty clunky at points. Obviously, it’s supposed to be a hardcore-type match with FTW rules, but there were a few notable spots that just looked dangerously bad. The first was HOOK getting clipped by the table when it didn’t break after Shibata sent HOOK crashing onto Jericho. It looked like HOOK hit the back of his head, and I’m surprised he didn’t knock himself loopy after that. The other spot I’m thinking of also involved a table, when HOOK sent Big Bill through one from the apron onto a table on the floor below. The way Big Bill crashed through it, the legs of the table were dangerously close to his face and head; it looked like it broke weird, to me.

One of the worst things about this match was what I thought was clever interference, but there was absolutely no reaction from the crowd. Bryan Keith was the one to take the double submission from Shibata and HOOK on “Dynamite,” that caused this match to be a triple threat in the first place. He interfered wearing all black and in a luchador mask when Jericho was being set up for the same spot that her succumbed to. It made perfect sense, and forever whatever reason, I didn’t see it coming, so I thought it worked well. The crowd in Vegas however? Not so much. The fact Jericho “hired” “The Bounty Hunter” was actually a good plot point that fell completely flat.

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While this match had some good points, like the bag Jericho pulled out from under the ring not being thumbtacks, but dice, the points that fell flat for me really fell flat. I’m also not sure where Jericho with the FTW Championship goes from here. It feels like it belongs with HOOK until the championship is just flat-out retired. If HOOK continues to feud with Jericho, that’s going to be frustrating. I feel like I’m stuck in the Jericho Vortex myself, and on a pretty great show overall, this was a low point for me.

Written by Daisy Ruth