AEW Redemption 2026 Discussion

[DavidB6937]

Hardly the first time Tony has stolen stuff off here.

[RedTwoster]

2 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

Hardly the first time Tony has stolen stuff off here.

On that note, @HarmonicGenerator and I have been moaning about MyAEW freezing when streamed on an iPad - I managed to watch both Redemption and Collision in this way without either show freezing at all, so Tony, if you’ve seen our posts and fixed this specifically for us (which is definitely what has happened here), thank you. Next, please main event a PPV with a women’s match. And have your announcers deliver a trigger warning shortly before any segment or match featuring Roderick Strong. Thanks!

[HarmonicGenerator]

23 minutes ago, RedTwoster said:

On that note, @HarmonicGenerator and I have been moaning about MyAEW freezing when streamed on an iPad - I managed to watch both Redemption and Collision in this way without either show freezing at all, so Tony, if you’ve seen our posts and fixed this specifically for us (which is definitely what has happened here), thank you. Next, please main event a PPV with a women’s match. And have your announcers deliver a trigger warning shortly before any segment or match featuring Roderick Strong. Thanks!

Same! Actually I got two freezes during Fletcher-Bandido, but that was pretty much it. Hopefully it lasts. Thank you Tony.

And if we're dealing with Roderick Strong, Tony, I'm going to need you to do something proper with the Conglomeration, or just Orange Cassidy, in time for Wembley. Mrs HG is willing to come with me but as it stands, none of her favourites will be there. The Acclaimed are no more, Samoa Joe and Timeless Toni Storm are off TV, and that just leaves OC. If he's lost in the shuffle, she'll be off to the Travelodge well before show finishes.

Edited July 28 by HarmonicGenerator
Also Tony if you are there, if you can make sure there are no utter idiot dem wans sat near us making smarky comments all through the show as well, that'd really increase her ability to enjoy the show, thank you so much

[Supremo]

Will Ospreay shocked that the faction that breaks necks (including his own!) and suffocates people with plastics bags wants to break someone’s neck and then suffocate them with a plastic bag.

Edited July 28 by Supremo

[LaGoosh]

He's never been the smartest of guys. 

[HarmonicGenerator]

I'm telling you, it's been amnesia this whole time.

[RedTwoster]

23 minutes ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

And if we're dealing with Roderick Strong, Tony, I'm going to need you to do something proper with the Conglomeration, or just Orange Cassidy, in time for Wembley. Mrs HG is willing to come with me but as it stands, none of her favourites will be there.

God, I wish I’d never tagged you in this post, what a thing to say. Don’t listen to him, Tony!! 

[Supremo]

AEW Unreal, with them explaining, “the magic.”

”The best characters are when wrestlers turn their real personality up to eleven. Ospreay’s already a thick idiot in real life, so we’re going to make him the thickest idiot alive.”

[BomberPat]

I watched bits of the show in my lunchbreak and then after work yesterday. Still have the top two matches to go, but have given up on being spoiler-free. Glad that they've gone somewhere with the Death Riders/Ospreay stuff, but what a waste of time that whole journey was. 

20 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

I still can't get my head around why they thought this approach to Ospreay was a good idea. His ascent to the title should've been one of the easiest, clearest paths they've had. It's not like he's a guy who struggles to get the crowd behind him so they needed to manufacture some sort of support or anything. If anything they've absolutely diluted him by all this shit. Such a weird journey.

The reference I usually reach for when talking about this storyline is Debra in the build to Wrestlemania X-7 - by the time we get to All In, I want to hear "forget about Moxley, he's a non-factor" and pretend it never happened. But watching the Ospreay and Mox tag team match on this show I realised what it actually most reminds me of. It's Daniel Bryan in the Wyatt Family. A completely needless bonkers detour on what should be the clearest, most obvious babyface route to the World Title possibly, where somebody decides that what the anointed next babyface champion really needs is to spend a few weeks dicking around as a member of a heel faction led by a guy they used to hate. Who did this story help? Fucking nobody. There's no version of this that wouldn't have been better just as Will getting revenge on Moxley for injuring him, putting that in the rear view mirror, and moving on to All In for the match that actually matters.

This was, from what I've watches so far, a completely skippable unimportant B-level pay-per-view. What hasn't helped that is that Will's story was about Mox, and the Young Bucks had almost nothing to do with it. Kenny was, despite being World Champion, a supporting player in that story far more than he was actively feuding with Kevin Knight. Kevin Knight was spending most of his time feuding with Darby Allin, not Kenny Omega. The show barely came together in less than two weeks.

 

• Ladder Match - popcorn stuff, mostly bollocks. I like a lot of the guys in this match, but it's the most Money In The Bank ladder match AEW have ever done, and I don't mean that positively. There was no connecting tissue whatsoever, just lots of wrestlers waiting for their turn to do a spot until it eventually ended. Speedball, the hometown babyface and eventual winner, hitting a gorgeous moonsault off a ladder, and then Jack Perry following it up immediately with a worse moonsault off the same ladder was genuinely maddening. Zero good reason for that spot.
   
• Young Bucks vs. Death Riders was bollocks. There were good bits when they were just allowed to wrestle, but every time they tried to do melodrama, it suffered massively. "Why am I so violent? Why does my wrestling make me sad?" Will Ospreay is the worst version of Will Ospreay. Aside from it being a pointless and damaging diversion on the road to All In, apart from it making Will in character look like a massive fucking idiot with terrible judgement, aside from the fact that we're constantly being told that Will Ospreay has been transformed into a more dangerous wrestler despite him wrestling exactly the same as he did before, I'll tell you what my least favourite part of this - @tiger_rick said that it makes sense not to just do Ospreay vs. Death Riders because it's been done, but you know what else has been done? Will Ospreay learning that he had the capacity to be violent and then regretting it, leading in to a big match at Wembley Stadium. It's the Tiger Driver '91 bollocks all over again, and I fucking hated that storyline too - not least of all because Will still used the Stormbreaker, which has the same set-up as the Tiger Driver, so every time he hooked his opponent's arms it got this awkward "wait, hang on, is this supposed to be important or not?" reaction from the crowd.  Incredible wrestler, fucking horrendous creative instincts.
   
• I always say that the secret to booking wrestling is that it's really easy. Everybody complicates it by pretending it's more of a science than it is, or thinking that it should be CINEMA or theatre or Shakespeare, and not just wrestling. Take two great wrestlers, have them wrestle a great wrestling match, and you're 90% of the way. If one's a great heel and the other a great face, and you can convince me that they dislike each other, even better. Following up that tag match with Kyle Fletcher vs. Bandido couldn't have been a better illustration of that - it turns out that wrestling is really good when you let really good wrestlers wrestle. Who'd have thunk it? Bandido was my wrestler of the year in 2025, and Kyle Fletcher has been consistently brilliant for ages, so this was always going to be good and it still overdelivered. With Grand Slam Mexico coming up, there was just enough doubt in my mind to think that Bandido could win this too, which helped.
   
• The Dogs vs The Bang Bang Gang was shit. The most heatless and bloodless chain match imaginable. It had me thinking that maybe blood was banned in Montreal, though I was fairly certain that wasn't the case. Now I suspect they were told not to blade in order to protect the Jericho match, and fuck that. If you're not going to let people bleed, maybe don't book them in a gimmick match that all but requires it. There were some fun spots with the chain, but mostly it never made me care. Not least of all because The Dogs have never been booked particularly credibly, this feud hinges on expecting people to care about David Finlay and Jay White falling out in the arse-end of Bullet Club in NJPW years ago, and there was just no meat to it. The Dogs need some proper wins under their belts, so I get the logic of them winning here, and them as adjuncts to the Death Riders makes me think there's going to be a big Dogs & Death Riders Stadium Stampede against assorted babyfaces at All In, but Jay White returned with a phenomenal babyface promo that made him look a million bucks, and he deserves far better than being Adam Copeland's substitute mate when Christian isn't around, and being slotted right back into a Collision Cowboys feud.
   
• Maya World vs Hikaru Shida was way too long, with way too many near-falls for what it was. Maya hasn't been around enough to have a particularly established set of signature moves, so it was never really clear what was supposed to be a big dramatic "I can't believe she kicked out of that" and what was just moves for moves' sake. I completely get riding the goodwill behind her and giving her a push while they have the chance, wrestling needs to be able to respond organically to things like that, and actually that's the beauty of having two women's singles titles - one belt can be locked up in a big storyline planned months in advance, the other they can afford to play around with a bit more. But Maya's not at the level to have this long a competitive match with someone like Shida, who also isn't enough of a dominant heel for the win to feel as much of a massive upset as they were aiming for. There was a point I hated, where Maya looked like a complete idiot - she hit a Shining Wizard, then just stared at Shida for what felt like an age rather than trying to cover her, only to pick her back up to hit another one, and then another one, and then Shida rolled out of the ring and was on her feet in seconds, so if the Shining Wizard was meant to be a big move it made it look like shit, and it made Maya look like a moron for not even trying to win the match after one or two of them. My girlfriend suggested that the Shining Wizard was a little inside jab at Nixon Newell refusing to take the match that ended up going to Maya because she didn't think she'd gain anything from losing in three minutes, and it would be very funny if that's true.
   
• Tag Title match was fine. I'm glad they've settled on a formula of Christian Cage playing Ricky Morton for Cope to make the hot tag; Cope is the explosive offence guy out of the two, and Cage is better at selling for sympathy, so that's the best way to structure their matches. Copeland wrestles every match, and cuts every promo, like you have to know that he's the toughest, funniest, coolest wrestler in the world, while Christian wrestles like he's old and knackered and knows he can't keep up with wrestlers half his age and twice his speed, but he knows every single trick there is to stay one step ahead of them anyway, and that's a much more interesting way to wrestle. Cope is far more palatable in a tag match than he was as a top level singles star, though. 
  It's not an AEW PPV if I don't have complaints about agenting, though - this match had the exact same double-down spot as the previous match. On top of that, "babyface wrestler valiantly fights alone against the Death Riders while his tag partner is incapacitated" shouldn't describe two matches on the same show!
   
• Jericho vs. Ciampa was better than it had any right to be, and would have been better without the Painmaker bollocks. The fact that they introduced the Painmaker as "undefeated in AEW" as if it's a separate bloke to Chris Jericho, he clearly wants it to be his Great Muta, but it's shit, even with the brilliant Judas Priest entrance music. One of the few things Jericho can still do really well at this point in his career is mental plunder-filled brawls, and despite being expressly designed for them, the Painmaker makes them expressly worse than they would be if this was just Chris Jericho. Jericho dicking about with hockey stuff could be fun, but Jericho getting pops for a hockey mascot cuddly toy while wearing his shit Alice Cooper facepaint and trying to get it over as the darkest and most violent part of his psyche is absolutely shit. I laughed out loud almost immediately in this match, because The Painmaker, this uncontrollably violent persona that only wants to inflict pain and suffering on his opponents, rapidly went for a pinfall after the first wrestling move of the match. Absolute bollocks. I did get a small amount of amusement out of massive hockey fan Jericho having to get cheap pops for a team he doesn't support, while the heel was getting booed for wearing the shirt of a team Jericho's dad actually played for. 
  
  Jericho creeping around the announce table silently making a stupid face at the camera gave me an absolutely cursed thought - one day we're going to get The Painmaker vs. Lio Rush.
  
  The match was better the less Painmaker it was. It's a shame that when Ciampa brought out a thumbtack covered kneepad after hitting his running knee, that the announcers immediately called it an elbow pad, meaning I instantly called that Jericho was going to use it to hit the Judas Effect. One thing I've been really critical of in the build for this match is the two of them threatening to use a drill on each other, because wrestlers should never threaten something that the audience don't believe they'd go through with, and while it was still very silly, they made the eventual drill spot as convincing as it could have been.
   
• I thought Andrade vs. Mark Davis was really good, both are just on top form. My main criticism of this match, though, is that it needed Don Callis, or members of the Don Callis Family trying to run interference. Andrade's beef is with Callis more than Davis, so keep that in the forefront of people's minds. More importantly, though, the stipulation of the International Title match was that everyone was barred from ringside because Kyle Fletcher wanted to go it alone without Don's help. The significance of that stip should have been reinforced by having the other Don Callis Family member's title defence contrast it - there's nothing exceptional about Kyle Fletcher going it alone without the Don Callis Family if other members of the same faction are doing the same thing on the same show.
  
  Speaking of which, the problem of AEW's many many titles is that none of them have a clear identity. The closest was the Continental Title, because it at least had a set of rules surrounding it. Except Moxley's last two big title matches had no time limit, so it turns out Continental rules are completely negotiable anyway. And one of the other defining rules is "everyone is barred from ringside", and on this show that rule was applied to a different title match anyway, so what unique identity that belt has barely matters any more.

 

 

I'll watch the rest over the next couple of days. But mostly so far this has felt like a Dynamite special more than a PPV. Even the stuff I've complained about wasn't bad or offensive wrestling, aside from the story beats in the Mox/Ospreay tag match, but that's the level AEW are generally at - you know the wrestling will always be at least good, but what you really want is for it to make you care. This show hasn't managed that yet.

[Hannibal Scorch]

A fun and enjoyable Jericho match in 2026? Wonders never cease.

[The King Of Swing]

I could just about live with Thekla losing but Shida, as well.

Fuck off 0/10.

I'm one of the bigger AEW apologists on here, but that was boring as fuck.

[Statto]

If they did indeed instruct no blood in any other matches to make Jericho/Ciampa stand out (and that would be surprising restraint for AEW), they ought to have also

a) told Tony Schiavone not to talk constantly about how blood was inevitable in that match and was about to start flowing any second &

b) not let Jay White go out there in his namesake colour. He definitely thought there was going to be claret aplenty when he packed his bag.

Why did Schiavone keep doing weird shit with his hands every time he was on camera, too? It was like he was doing the Blockbusters hand jive.

Yeah, this was generally long and dull. Highlight was Kevin Knight's new music which is really good. Andrade's new music isn't. Finally turn him face and immediately ditch the clearly babyface music he's had all along.

[Chili]

Still, Jacques Rougeau was getting honoured on the pre show and told anyone booing to kiss his arse because he's a brilliant carny shithouse, so in my opinion, roaring success of a show. 

Edited July 28 by Chili

[DavidB6937]

1 minute ago, Ralphy said:

My only gripe when I watch aew ppv is that the show's are too long

I believe they have a big enough roster to maybe a few times a year to take a leaf out of wwe book and do a Saturday and Sunday ppv split

Multi day PPVs are the worst.

[RedTwoster]

41 minutes ago, Ralphy said:

My only gripe when I watch aew ppv is that the show's are too long

I believe they have a big enough roster to maybe a few times a year to take a leaf out of wwe book and do a Saturday and Sunday ppv split

That would be overkill. The way to improve an AEW PPV isn't to increase the number of them, it's to decrease the length and the number of matches. It's not hard to look at Redemption and remove matches to the point that it becomes a much better watch, and even with the good AEW PPVs (which is almost all of them, to be fair) the same can be done.