BomberPat

I worry about Eddie Kingston too; I think he's in a better place than he has been in the past, but it's still a rough time for someone who struggles as he does. I remember when Larry Sweeney died, it was the strength of King's tributes to him that made me a fan, and people around CHIKARA at the time would talk partly but not entirely in kayfabe about how Eddie only really had a handful of friends in the business, and Larry was one. From there to lose Brodie Lee, Jay Briscoe, Butcher, and now PAC, obviously it's horrible for everyone involved but Eddie Kingston, Bryce Remsburg and Excalibur are the people who always come to mind first for me - Eddie because of how much he wears his heart on his sleeve, Bryce for similar reasons and because he always posts really heartfelt messages remembering friends he's lost, and Excalibur just for having the job of trying to communicate to an audience not just the fact that they've lost someone, but trying to convey the love a locker room had for that person, and how he's had to do that far too often for a young company.

Mighty Sparrow, aged 91 earlier this week. Legendary Trinidadian calypso singer. I discovered him from Eliza Carthy's cover of Mister Walker, and her at a live show explaining who he was and show she came to his music, but well worth digging into in general, there's some real gems in the back catalogue, from a genre I always want to know more of and rarely know where to start.

Aside from the insistence that he work a twenty minute Triple H match (the same problem they hit with Goldberg - almost makes me think Triple H was making up for missing out on the Invasion by finding time to bury WCW talent after the fact), the main thing I remember is that for the rematch at No Way Out Scott Steiner was wearing tights with stars and stripes on them. The show was in fucking Montreal, Scotty!

This is something I was singing his praises for just yesterday, which makes this whole situation feel so much more surreal. The way modern wrestling works, a high-flyer is kind of inherently a babyface thing to be - it's fast-paced, it's death-defying, it's exciting, all things designed to pop an audience. A lesser wrestler would have seen the way to get himself over as a heel would be to just cut all that stuff out, don't give the fans anything to be impressed by, and get back to basics. What PAC was better than anyone I think I've ever seen at was working heel without diminishing his athleticism in that way; the way he was able to get a move as mind-blowing as the Black Arrow over not as an impressively flippy acrobatic display, but as a really targeted, offensive attack. It's so rare that the focus on a top rope move is what it does rather than how it looks. And it wasn't just the Black Arrow - even at All Out, he was doing all the usual flips and handsprings and roll-throughs, but because he does them so slow and deliberately, it's still heel work, there's still intensity to it. Even when he does speed up, it never feels like he's upping the pace of the match to make things feel more exciting, it feels like "oh fuck, here he comes", because you know that whatever he does at the end of it is going to look brutal. A guy who does flips and dives and acrobatics shouldn't work as a "Death Riders", but it's a testament to him that he was arguably the most convincing and the most terrifying of the lot of them. And I've just realised how much of that I was still writing in present tense about him. Fuck.

I hadn't even thought about this but, no, it doesn't look like it. Nothing on their website or any of their social media.

I used to live on quite a large estate, where there were multiple blocks of flats, both called something Gardens. The buildings had pretty clear signage, but at least once a week something would be delivered to our number but the wrong building, or vice-versa. Or you'd be told something was left "with a neighbour", and it was basically a complete write-off because it could mean fucking anywhere. Amazon were the worst, because of the insane thing where if something is marked as delivered when it isn't, they won't let you file a complaint for 48 hours in case it shows up. Well was it fucking delivered or wasn't it, then? They'd always explain that the tracking was updated prematurely or some bollocks like that, and never have an answer for, "then why was it specifically updated to say that it was handed to a resident, or signed for? Why was it marked as delivered, and then when I went downstairs to check I could literally see the van driving away?".

it feels weird to be talking about this show after the news about PAC. I thought it was that weird AEW phenomenon of being generally really good, but totally inessential. Nothing that happened on this show felt like it has any long-term impact or will matter all that much by the end of the year. PAC vs. Andrade was fantastic, the Trios match was great fun, and Okada vs. Ciampa managed to be absolutely brilliant in spite of being set up to fail by being absurdly presented as a dream match. Top end of the card I thought was a slog. The Ladder match had its moments, but there was very little to it that won't just blur into every other big ladder match spot of the last few years. I largely hated the main event. The Death Riders/Ospreay storyline is so bogged down with ideas never explored to fruition and "tell don't show" bullshit that the dynamic is a mess, no part of the story felt like it was satisfactorily concluded, and "Will Ospreay beats the guy who broke his neck" was barely even a factor in the story they were telling, which is just a complete failure in my eyes. I love an overbooked schmozz, and it was too overbooked for my tastes, just far too busy for far too little reward. What's more frustrating is that it's a Champion vs. Champion match, and because of the mess of the story, that just didn't matter. That should be an exceptional main event, but AEW do them so often it's just a non-factor. There was one line in a promo about how Mox wouldn't have the advantage because there wasn't a 20 minute time limit, but Mox has already had two title defences this year where they got rid of the 20 minute time limit for Continental rules anyway! Moxley has had the Continental Title since December 2025, he won a tournament to win it, he won another tournament to defend it, he's presumably going into a third tournament to defend it again in November, he's beaten all-comers in that time - I don't know who it helps to have him lose to a different champion. Maybe if the story was that he's going to lose in the C2 because losing to Will has knocked his confidence, but that explicitly wasn't the story they told - they went with "Moxley accepts his fate". And to make matters worse, Ospreay's next challenger is Okada, and he has Andrade waiting in the wings - they're having the World Champion beat every other singles champion, and that's not even the storyline. The Steve Borden stuff is such a bad luck moment. He shouldn't have been doing it this early in his career, and the blame sits with the agent, but there's also a reputational thing with Darby Allin - I think Darby is likely smart and self-aware enough to not be asking other people to do the kind of big stunts he does, but the moment you make it explicit that the daredevil who doesn't care about his own safety is the mentor to the green young rookie, every time that rookie takes a risk there's going to be a spotlight on Darby. My gut instinct is that it's probably a spot they ran through in training a dozen times, nailed it every time, and then it just went wrong on the night because even when you think you've got it nailed, you haven't factored in the impact of the adrenaline of working in front of a crowd, the fatigue of doing it deep into a match, the ropes being looser or damper than you expect, all these other factors.

I've had a running joke with my partner and some friends in the wrestling business about how the difference between Pac and Ben is that Ben wears so many clothes. Pac is always in trunks, but when you see Ben backstage, he's in a shirt, fleece, hoodie, hat, glasses, halfway to looking like Joey wearing all of Chandler's clothes. I was absolutely stunned hearing the news this morning. I can't really say anything that hasn't been said; just an incredible talent, and a great bloke who knew his worth, knew his credibility, and did as much as he could to help others and leave wrestling better than he found it. I wrote a lot after All In about how a lot of younger wrestlers and fans don't realise how the idea of making it from a tiny UK independent to headlining a stadium show was unthinkable not that long ago, and honestly I don't think that happens without Pac opening as many doors as he did twenty years ago. Apparently AEW wrestlers found out the news while they were at Andy Williams' celebration of life. Just a devastating thought.

The PPV replay wasn't available on Prime this morning either, when it normally is up pretty much straight away. I assume they have either edited the show, or at least were considering doing so, so the PPV replay isn't/wasn't front and centre until they were sure what they were dealing with.

as I've said, I've given up on predicting the end of or any meaningful change to the Death Riders - but surely they're not planning on having Jon Moxley win another Continental Classic, having won the last one, and the Continental Cup? Surely they do something there? Maybe they do some kind of Death Riders derby there, with one of the others upsetting him to kick things off. He wrestled Claudio in the Cup, and in the Classic last year, maybe they decide third time's a charm and have Mox lose this time around? Or maybe the Death Riders just persist forever.

I don't think you've missed anything. AEW is generally pretty fluid with the heel/face dynamics, but taking Ciampa from violent unhinged heel to de facto babyface is one of the odder moves.

I grew up with breakfast, dinner and tea. The posher families I knew might say "supper". Not long after we moved to Jersey, I was round a mate's house for the day, and as evening started drawing in, some of the other kids there started to talk about how they would have to call their parents to get picked up. I said, "oh yeah, I hadn't even told my parents I'd be having dinner here", and someone asked, "are you?". And I was so confused - we had already had dinner, but they were talking about it as something in the future tense. That's when I realised that there were people who called the midday meal "dinner". So these days I tend to be breakfast, lunch, tea. I could easily adapt to lunch as the midday meal, but I'd never be comfortable calling the evening meal "dinner". The boring etymology part of it all is that "dinner" historically meant the largest meal of the day, rather than a meal at a specific time; if you worked on a farm, you'd be getting up at first light to make the most of the daylight, so you'd need something big to eat by midday. Chances are you lived on or close to the land you were working on, so you could return home for a big cooked dinner. But historically if you've got a middle class job, chances are you live further away from your work, so you grab a small lunch during the day, and the big cooked dinner is pushed back to the evening when you get home. "Lunch" becomes more widespread as industrialisation means more people are working further from their home, and having to grab food on the go, and "lunch" becomes something more related to work - so even if you call the meal dinner, you'd still take a lunch break rather than a dinner break.

the problem with the idea of Kidd leading the Death Riders is that - and I hate this - he's also still in The Dogs. I think there is a story to be told of Gabe Kidd being willing to go further than the Death Riders, though I don't believe Gabe Kidd has the ability to tell that story well. Any splintering of the Death Riders I think has to come down to their weird dual identity; on one hand, Moxley is all about the sanctity of professional wrestling as a sport, and forcing everyone else to take it seriously and up their game, while on the other hand they're breaking people's necks, suffocating people with plastic bags, and generally being horrible cunts. One thing I've always disliked about them is how AEW can't make their mind up whether we're supposed to believe Mox when he's talking about the former, if he keeps doing the latter - they could almost manage to resolve all of that if it becomes the sticking point they break up over. I think the Death Riders should splinter into two groups; one loosely aligned, where the focus is on serious wrestling, and another that is chiefly made up of horrible shits who far more interested in just having an excuse to hurt people. I'd say have Yuta as the centrepiece of the second group, but he seems to have taken way more of a backseat since Gabe Kidd was in the mix, which is a shame, as he's the perfect little creep to step up into a kind of Kylo Ren role of trying to act up to his hero worship of the old big bad, and learning all the wrong lessons from it.

I was concerned about that, and the tone of the Teams chat never really goes beyond "this is what he wants, and this is the background", a few people saying "well he's never going to get it" or "surely taking a university to court will cost him more than that?", with the worst of it being laugh reacts. I don't think we've said anything that would insult or denigrate him. I also suspect he wouldn't know how to do an FOI request in the first place. I have a call with Legal to talk through it this morning. This one expense claim for less than forty quid has ended up costing me half my time this week!

I gave up predicting a Death Riders split a long time ago. They didn't split when Moxley lost the title, they didn't split when Moxley kept tapping out, they didn't split when Moxley lost to Darby Allin, they didn't split over Ospreay, and I'm sure I'm missing half a dozen other potential catalysts in there too. I don't know what to expect from Ospreay/Moxley. The other week, Will told Mox that he had the advantage because he had him for 60 minutes, not 20. That makes me dread that they're at least considering having it go the distance. Everybody knows I've found the whole Ospreay/Death Riders storyline a complete waste of time, so I would hope that All Out is the end of it, but how slow and lacklustre the build has been makes it feel like they're holding something back for a rematch, and that they're going to gimmick that up as a Lights Out or a Street Fight or something. The schedule of big shows for the next couple of months is bonkers, so they could easily burn through a Death Riders/Ospreay multi-match series before the end of the year. Grand Slam France is in a couple of weeks; I can see them running Ospreay vs. Gabe Kidd there. I'm not sure why else Gabe Kidd would have been such a ridiculously big part of the build for a match he isn't in. Less than two weeks after that is Wrestledream - a year on from Moxley losing to Darby Allin - and maybe they do Ospreay vs. Moxley in a rematch there, or a United Empire/Death Riders tag. Start of November is Blood & Guts, and I can't see that being anything but Death Riders vs. United Empire, and I think AEW and Ospreay in particular are really into symmetry and repetition in how they present wrestling, so I think they will have a callback there to Ospreay being trapped in a cage with the Death Riders and having his neck broken - either they try and do it again but Will is able to fight back, or Will has the opportunity to do the same to Moxley. 10 days after that is Full Gear, and by then they could be up to the third Ospreay/Moxley match in this series, so maybe blow it off there with the big gimmick match. That leaves World's End for a fresh start, challenger-wise, and then build up a big match for Ospreay in Liverpool in February. The Continental Classic starts on the Dynamite after Full Gear, so having Moxley/Ospreay all wrapped up before that starts gives Moxley a clean run at the tournament. The only wrinkle in all of this is that, when writing it out, I pictured Steve Borden getting the last babyface spot in Blood & Guts, coming in and doing a mad vertical leap from one ring into the other, and now I say sod Will Ospreay and the Death Riders and book whatever gets us to that.