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JWeinCom on 19 June 2023
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Collision's Debut was pretty ok. In a lot of ways seems like the type of product a lot were hoping for when AEW started.

Regardless of whether you like him or not, Punk is probably still the best on the mic in the industry. Only people coming close are Heyman, Sami Zayn, and surprisingly Jey Uso, but even they're not on that level. He was allowed to do the kind of fourth wall bending promo he built his career on. However you think they handled the situation with him and the Bucks, this is kind of what you want from Punk.

Aside of that, the show was pretty much all wrestling, with the exception of an acclaimed promo. The matches were closer to WWE style than indy style, but there were more clean finishes and the matches were each given a reasonable amount of time, although maybe some shouldn't have. The matches varied in quality with the main event and Andrade/Matthews matches being really good, and the rest varying between decent (Miro/Neese), and meh (Willow/Skye Blue vs Ruby Soho and Toni Storm).

The main drawbacks here are that they don't do a lot of recaps and such. Which to people who follow the product regularly can be considered a good thing, but for people that don't not so much. Even as someone who is generally aware of some of the going ons in AEW, I was definitely missing a lot of things that were going on. I think more could have been done to establish who the good guys or bad guys were, and just who was who in general. On the whole, there wasn't a lot of emphasis on storylines. The matches were mostly good, but except for a couple didn't seem to have any personal issue behind them. To be fair though, this and the prior issue could just be the fact that this is a new show. So we'll see.

Overall, it was decent. If I were home on a Saturday night or bored on a Sunday morning, there's a good chance I'd turn it on. But, for me personally, I really need a strong story component to get into things. It's rare that I can get into a match without a story behind it, even if it's a good match. So, they would have to build the stories more if I was going to go out of my way to catch the show. But, for people who just want to see some good matches, this was a solid two hours of wrestling.