AEW Collision & Battle Of The Belts 7/15/23: 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved

Saturday night's usually only alright for two hours of fighting, but this week, we got three! The latest episode of "Collision" was immediately followed by a brand new "Battle of the Belts," to the extent that the fallout from "Collision's" main event was still happening when "Battle of the Belts" started, and boy was there a lot to love and a lot to hate over the course of those three hours. Four championships were defended, two Owen Hart Tournament finals matches were contested, and the House of Black also had a match for some reason! A lot of stuff went down, and we have feelings about almost all of it.

As usual, for the objective results of these shows, you can go to our live coverage of "Collision" and "Battle of the Belts," respectively. Those will help you if you just want to know what went down. If you want to know what we thought about what went down, including one of the best matches we've ever seen in AEW, one of the dumbest heel turns we've ever seen in AEW, and a satellite outage, this is the place for you. Here are three things we hated and three things we loved about the three hours of AEW programming broadcast on 7/15/2023.

After last week's phenomenal eliminator match between FTR and Bullet Club Gold, this week's championship match had a lot to live up to. Fortunately, it was a two-out-of-three falls match, and FTR has something a history of putting on phenomenal tag matches under that format. This match was no exception; it took up the entire first hour of the show, drawing things out with FTR's signature subversion of tag tropes and masterfully building on the story of the previous contest, once again making it seem utterly impossible to keep Jay White's shoulders down for three. The only complaint we can come up with is that for the second week in a row, these four men should have main-evented over CM Punk.

Did it need to be nearly an hour long? Maybe not. The highlight of the match, without a doubt, was the second fall, in which FTR narrowly avoided a sweep on several occasions and repeatedly failed to pin White. That was the most effective part of the match when it came to building drama and getting the fans invested. We could, perhaps, have done without the extended portion that took place on the outside, as it ultimately added little. The finish, however, which involved both teams trying to tap each other out with Sharpshooters — FTR because of their relationship with Bret Hart, BCG because of the firearm imagery, and both teams because it's Canada — was a lot of fun, particularly the callback to the way FTR lost the "NXT" Tag Team Championship back at Takeover: Toronto in 2016. And while it seemed as though the feud might get dragged out even further due to a time limit draw, the right call was ultimately made, with FTR retaining the titles but failing to pin or submit White. It wouldn't have made a whole of sense for White and Robinson to win the tag titles mere weeks after welcoming the Gunns into their ranks, and the important thing was for White to be protected in the match, which he was. Beyond that, this was just an absolute classic, proving once again that tag team wrestling, always and forever, is the best wrestling.

Wait, so they're the House of Black, but when it's just Malaki Black and Brody King, they're the Kings of the Black Throne? That is a mouthful. We generally honor the House of Black around these parts, but we don't love that two of the three AEW Trios Champions have their own special name. It just seems unnecessary. Which, by the way, also describes their match this week.

Squash matches are good, and AEW should be doing more of them. This, however, was not a squash match. On a night that saw one of "Collision's" four matches go an hour long, we cannot for the life of us understand why there were multiple tags between the House of Black's jobber opponents. There's just no reason to do this. It prolongs a match that doesn't need to be prolonged and it lessens the positive impact for the winners, aka the actual members of the roster, which is presumably the entire reason you're doing the match. Just a very strange choice. It's kind of a shame that this was Black's first match on "Collision," and there was zero actual advancement of HOB's feud with Andrade El Idolo, who came out for the finish but was basically involved. This storyline was a highlight of "Collision's" first couple episodes, but recently it has become a slog. If it doesn't get some serious time and attention soon, we are in grave danger of no longer caring.

Oh, and also House of Black are going to defend their trios titles against The Acclaimed again, because ... reasons?

CM Punk vs. Ricky Starks was always going to have a hard time measuring up against the tag team title match, but that didn't mean it had to be an abomination. Good lord, we hated this match. It was slow, it was plodding, and it was boring for almost the entire duration. At times, it was easy to forget Starks existed, as the confrontation taking center stage was between Punk and the once again divided Canadian crowd, but when we were able to concentrate on Punk and Starks wrestling each other, all we saw were both men's limitations. And while in theory, we're happy that Starks won, in practice, this finish was absolute garbage.

The problem here, as we see it, is that Punk and Starks are terrible opponents for each other. Starks has tons of charisma and athleticism, but isn't always able to put it together in the ring without help. Punk, meanwhile, is just clearly only capable of working a certain pace and style of match at this point in his career, and having to work that style of match means Starks can't be as dynamic as usual. Ironically, both men are conceivably better suited for WWE, which rewards screen presence and storytelling ability more than crazy spots and fast-paced action, but this is AEW, and the match has nothing going on in terms of story. Punk is out here trying to turn the thing into an MMA match, which contributes to its boringness, and meanwhile the crowd can't make up its mind about who to cheer ... especially at the end.

It has to be acknowledged that both Owen Hart Tournament winners this year were Black, which is a major step forward for AEW. However, we can't disagree more with the way Starks won. We were hoping for a CM Punk heel turn during or after this match. We were not expecting, and very much not hoping for, a Ricky Starks heel turn. The fact that AEW has been unable to make Starks work as a babyface, despite the fact that he was extraordinarily popular, is a testament to his lack of creativity, and ending the Owen Hart tournament on a surprise roll-up and a rope grab is disappointing booking, to say the least. It was weird to bring in Jushin "Thunder" Liger for a moment with Starks that lasted five seconds on "Battle of the Belts," and it was weirder to follow that up with Starks acting perfectly normal during the presentation of the championship belts. Again, we're happy for Starks in theory, but we just can't fathom the logic at work here.

We haven't talked about it enough here because he's mainly been involved in tag matches recently, but for all our griping about AEW's storytelling, the story of Orange Cassidy and his International title reign is one of the best things the company has going right now. He keeps going through hell, he has an injured hand that won't stop getting hurt long enough to heal, and he somehow keeps winning his title matches. This one was a little bit different — facing off against the returning Lance Archer, a mountain of a man who looks like he would eat Cassidy for breakfast, it was all Cassidy could due to survive, ultimately using a bit of guile to retain the championship by count-out, the referee not raising his hand but checking on the champion as he writhed in pain on the mat.

In some ways, we don't love Tony Khan making Orange Cassidy a guy who has great matches on TV every week and is involved in a storyline about slowly being worn down by attrition. We miss the Cassidy character of old, who didn't deal in such serious matters. That said, Cassidy is a fantastic wrestler, and it's good to see that being recognized and rewarded, not just with a long-running and compelling storyline, but now, with the most consecutive successful title defenses in AEW history. We love the way this narrative is progressing, and we can't wait to see who actually takes the International title from Cassidy, and more importantly, how his defeat plays out.

We know, we know — we can't blame AEW for the weather in Calgary, which supposedly caused a satellite outage that prevented us from watching the finish of Toni Storm's AEW Women's World Championship defense against Taya Valkyrie. But it's fitting, isn't it? There was only one women's match on "Battle of the Belts," obviously, and of course that was the one that got interrupted (hilariously, we briefly got to see parts of a replay between last week's Julia Hart match on "Collision," so technically we actually did get two women's matches). It's like the universe decided to come up with a metaphor for how AEW books the women's division.

Anyway, Storm defeated Valkyrie, though she needed an illegal shot from Ruby Soho to do it. As for Soho herself, she lost her second straight Owen Hart Tournament final to Willow Nightingale in a match that naturally took place right after FTR vs. Bullet Club Gold, because for some reason the weird House of Black pseudo-squash couldn't go there instead? We love Willow and we're very glad she's finding success in AEW, but for strictly narrative purposes, we think a Soho win would have been the better choice. It would have shown that she's leveled up since joining the Outcasts, it would have allowed them to parade around with two belts instead of one, and it would have made the Outcasts in general look stronger, as opposed to having one of their members win via cheating while the other member tried to cheat and lost anyway. The Outcasts feel dead in the water right now, especially with Saraya, who was once discussed as the biggest hiring in the history of the AEW women's division, not really doing anything right now. The matches the women are putting on continue to be good; the booking and storytelling is still working about as well as a satellite in a thunderstorm.

We can't say we loved "Battle of the Belts" overall, and we can't say we loved the main event. It's been some time since this show was a relevant part of AEW's lineup, as evidenced by the fact that championships almost never change hands on the program anymore, and anchoring the thing on a TNT Championship match between Luchasaurus and Shawn Spears — whose build consisted entirely of one (1) random backstage segment on "Collision" — basically tells you everything you need to know. As with so many things in AEW, the in-ring work was perfectly fine, but the lack of build and the fact that there was no way in hell Shawn Spears was beating Luchasaurus made it very difficult to care.

You know what we do love, though? Christian Cage pretending he's TNT Champion. It's such a great bit. The way he takes the title himself after Luchasaurus wins, climbs to the top turnbuckle, raises the belt high and closes his eyes in ecstasy as though he's the one who accomplished something is absolutely exquisite heel work. We'll take this over his edgy worked shoot promos every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and it is going to be so sweet when Luchasaurus finally gets sick of this nonsense and pulverizes him. The function of a good heel to convince us to pay money to see him get his head caved in, and by that standard, Christian is one of the best heels in wrestling right now.