Matt Hardy says the All In main event is one of the best in-ring stories AEW has told, and that Kenny Omega’s willingness to work as the aggressor is what made it.
Hardy watched Will Ospreay beat Omega for the AEW World Championship on his flight home from a weekend of bookings, then watched the match again while doing cardio. He broke it down on the latest episode of The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy.
“I thought Kenny did an amazing job of controlling the pacing. He slowed stuff down so much, and the story was very simple with the neck,” Hardy said. “I love the aggressive thing, where he pulled the pad off the turnbuckle and he had Ospreay’s neck on it, and he was pushing it with his feet and then both feet, just trying to torture him and really zoning in on the neck.”
He said the pace was the thing people would argue about and the thing that worked.
“There was so much great selling from Will Ospreay in this match. I’m sure some people watched it like, oh, this isn’t fast enough for me. But it was the perfect pace, because I felt like the crowd stayed so energised. The ending was so strong,” Hardy said.
His reference point for that was advice he was given by Eddie Guerrero.
“Sometimes you’ve got to bring the crowd down, so they can rest and regain their feeling and emotion, so they can pop louder,” Hardy said. “I thought they did a really good job of doing that.”
He said the modern touches were still in there, including one of Ospreay’s signatures where he takes a hurricanrana and nips out to land on his feet, but that they were spliced in rather than stacked up.
The part that surprised him was how far Omega went into the heel role.
“Even right from the jump, when they locked up and got in the ropes for a clean break, there was a Kenny chop, and then Will struck him back a couple of times. But Kenny was almost overselling. He was really going out of his way,” Hardy said. “You could tell he was putting himself in the role of the heel, and he was trying to do whatever he could to make Will that night, and he worked hard to do it the whole match.”
He said that is harder than it sounds for someone the audience has been treating as a babyface, and that AEW had been walking the fence with Omega’s character for a while.
Ospreay bled early in the match, and Hardy said that was the right call.
“I even as a wrestler felt sympathy for Will during that match. Even when he gigged early, I dug that he gigged early,” Hardy said. “His whole blonde hair was all red and bloody, and he had so many great expressions when he was getting the s*** beat out of him. And it’s just like, holy f***, this is the hometown guy. Everybody wants to see him rise up and win. Kenny did such an amazing job of getting sympathy, and really putting him in that poor babyface that we want to see come back.”
Hardy also had a view on where the near falls and the kicking out belong on a card, which is at the top of it and nowhere else.
“That’s where it belongs, because those are the guys going on last. They’re in a tough spot. They’re going out for a crowd that could possibly be tired,” he said. “They should be the people that get everything. The other matches, we don’t need any of that s*** in there. You don’t need any no selling.”
He was fine with both men having cornermen at ringside, saying it was presented as a Japanese-style arrangement with seconds, and he credited the video package for using the New Japan footage of their earlier matches, which he said gave the whole thing a backstory.
His overall verdict put it above the company’s usual ceiling.
“They threw in the touches of the best things of a traditional pro wrestling match, as well as some of the best things in modern wrestling matches. I thought they really combined that, and it was a great recipe,” Hardy said. “I think it’s one of the best in-ring match stories that AEW has told.”
He extended that to the booking.
“Kudos to Tony Khan and crew for doing that main event. I thought it was one of the best big main events that AEW has ever had,” Hardy said. “And kudos to Kenny and Will. I thought it was a very strong match that would have worked whether it was on AEW. It would have worked if that match had happened in New Japan. It would have worked if it was the main event of WrestleMania. It was that good.”
Asked in the same conversation whether that makes Omega the greatest of all time, Hardy would not go that far, and said it depends entirely on what the question is measuring.
“There’s so many different qualifications you can look at,” Hardy said. “If you’re looking at it from the position of just pure in-ring ability and match quality, definitely. He could be looked at as that. But then you can’t ignore some of the other guys too.”
The name he reached for first was Shawn Michaels, who he and Jeff grew up on.
“Shawn Michaels was a guy who was a trailblazer for that. Shawn Michaels still stands up to me,” Hardy said. “He was so influential to us. He would always come up for big matches, and his work was unparalleled, and he was super entertaining with whatever he was doing too.”
He put Bret Hart in the same bracket, then made the case for a different measure entirely.
“You can’t deny a John Cena, or even a Stone Cold Steve Austin, just because they had big matches and they didn’t have that high of a work rate,” Hardy said. “They didn’t do the insane moves, but they still came up for these very big matches.”
On Omega himself, Hardy was not hedging.
“I can’t say enough good things about how great of a worker and an in-ring performer Kenny Omega is,” he said. “He really is. He’s off the chart.”
Hardy has held tag titles in WWE, TNA, ROH and AEW across a career that started in the mid-1990s. He currently works for TNA.
Ospreay won the title in 34 minutes at Wembley Stadium on August 30. Hardy’s verdict sits at one end of a week in which the match has been argued over by most of the industry’s veterans. Eric Bischoff called it a Nasty Boys match with no structure. Ric Flair said comparing Omega and Ospreay to his own series with Ricky Steamboat was like comparing the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Jim Ross said Bischoff was wrong, said the Flair post was unnecessary, and called All In the best show AEW has produced.
