All Elite Wrestling is on its way to Little Rock, AR and the Simmons Bank Arena for the historic 250th edition of DYNAMITE! AEW's flagship program has seen some wild nights since October 2, 2019, title fights and bloody battles, amazing verbal diatribes and emotional soliloquies, but this Wednesday night already looks to stand among the most memorable of those nights! AEW World Champion Swerve Strickland, coming off his victory over International Champion Will Ospreay, has challenged AEW Continental Champion Kazuchika Okada to a battle of champions as they both barrel towards Blood & Guts in Nashville!
Plus MJF will face Will Ospreay with that International Championship on the line, you know “The Bastard” PAC will have his eyes on that one after last week's Global victory, and TBS Champion Mercedes Moné has had her #AnyoneButBritt Open Challenge answered by former AEW Women's World Champion “The Native Beast” Nyla Rose! As loaded up as those matches are, that's not all going down in Little Rock; after the world watched Mariah May's disturbing betrayal of “Timeless” Toni Storm, we anticipate hearing from the 2024 Owen Hart Foundation Women's Tournament Winner as she looks towards a Wembley Stadium clash over the AEW Women's World Title!
DYNAMITE comes your way at 8pm ET/7pm CT on TBS, so be sure to visit the official AEW YouTube channel for highlights from last week's editions of DYNAMITE, RAMPAGE, and COLLISION, as well as Dr. Britt Baker D.M.D joining Renee Paquette on CLOSE-UP, RJ City welcoming “The Ace” Hiroshi Tanahashi onto HEY!(EW), and more!
Then come with All Elite Wrestling to Arlington, TX this Saturday for the first night of our summer residency at the Esports Stadium! It kicks off with COLLISION, featuring Skye Blue versus Hikaru Shida as well as a Lumberjack match between Thunder Rosa and Deonna Purrazzo, and continues Friday July 26th with ROH's DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR!
CHAMPION VS. CHAMPION...
AEW World Champion Swerve Strickland vs. AEW Continental Champion Kazuchika Okada
Last week, after watching “The American Dragon” Bryan Danielson win The Owen to earn an AEW World Championship match at ALL IN: LONDON 2024, Swerve Strickland made his way to the ring with title belt over his shoulder and addressed the numerous items laid out on his table. He talked about the grudge he holds against Bryan for when Danielson defeated him in a TNT Championship #1 Contender's Bout back in October of last year, and what that means for their scheduled bout at Wembley Stadium. Swerve talked about The EVPs and their attempt to bribe him into joining The Elite's side of the Blood & Guts Cage Match in Nashville, instead announcing his participation in that violent affair as a representative of Team AEW. Finally, he called out AEW Continental Champion Kazuchika Okada for a fight, champion versus champion, Team Elite versus Team AEW, with Blood & Guts just a week away!
This is quite the epic pairing, the kind of match that seemed an impossibility just a few years ago, but All Elite Wrestling is making it happen in Little Rock, AR tonight on TBS! With Blood & Guts looming, what kind of impact will this match have on that violent clash in Nashville? It's a chance for both teams to get a leg up on the other, who will get the first advantage for their team?
MARIAH MAY'S MASTERPIECE?
Was this always the plan? Was Mariah May just waiting for an opening to premiere her own masterpiece to the world? Has this been a long con perpetrated at Toni Storm's expense? Whatever was going through the mind of the 2024 Owen Hart Foundation Women's Tournament winner last week when she cracked The Timeless One's skull open with The Owen Title belt has only been known to her for the past week, but tonight on DYNAMITE we anticipate that will all change! Mariah May will be in Little Rock to let the world know why she did what she did to “Timeless” Toni Storm last week, and maybe what the rest of the path to ALL IN: LONDON 2024 may hold!
AEW INTERNATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH...
“The Aerial Assassin” Will Ospreay(c) vs. MJF
Who could've guessed that this match would come together as fast as it has? It wasn't even two months ago that Maxwell Jacob Friedman strolled back into All Elite Wrestling at DOUBLE OR NOTHING 2024 to kick Adam Cole in the groin and tell the world he wasn't going anywhere. Yet in that Las Vegas diatribe, as MJF addressed the state of AEW since his absence, he made it a point to target “The Aerial Assassin” Will Ospreay with just a little more vitriol than the rest.
As the AEW faithful in Sin City chanted “Bruv!” in response to MJF's rant, Max hyped his own accolades as AEW World Champion while simultaneously insulting “Silly Billy”. While it's impossible to argue with the facts of MJF's World Title reign, he stands as the longest reigning champion at 406-days and most defenses with 10, it was also difficult to not hear MJF's words as perhaps tainted with a little insecurity. In the five months since his AEW World Championship loss to Samoa Joe at WORLDS END, a great number of competitors stepped up their game, specifically AEW World Champion Swerve Strickland and AEW International Champion Will Ospreay, two men who'd earned the fans' respect through their hard work, despite the company they'd kept or some of their actions along the way.
That's not so different from the arc MJF traveled during his AEW tenure; he's committed some of the most horrendous acts in All Elite Wrestling history, said the most revolting things about fans and co-workers alike, yet his own dedication to the craft of professional wrestling actually won the AEW faithful over, and sadly blinded them to who MJF is at his core. He is a jealous, narcissistic, insecure man-child who abhors not being the center of attention at all times, so when Maxwell looked at the landscape of AEW without him in it and saw that he wasn't as missed as he'd hoped, that other individuals had supplanted his position as the top guys, he reverted to his true form. It ate him up when Daniel Garcia didn't immediately jump on the chance to fight him at ALL IN: LONDON 2024, and in fact never actually gave MJF a response to that offer. It destroyed MJF even further when Will Ospreay came out to interrupt that moment, became Garcia's focus ahead of their International Championship match, and left Max just lurking in the background of their moment.
He wasn't the focus anymore, at least not the sole one, and he wasn't the people's favorite scumbag, at least not in his own mind despite their chants of “He's our scumbag!” echoing through the arenas after his return. In MJF's mind it's Garcia, it's Swerve, it's Ospreay who've taken his position in their hearts, and he told the AEW faithful months ago what would happen if they broke his heart. Daniel Garcia paid the price for MJF's unjustifiable spite and rage, and tonight on DYNAMITE he aims to make Will Ospreay the next man who suffers at his hands. Partially because of who Ospreay is and the title he holds, partially just to jab another knife into the fans' hearts; it's a huge match for the 250th edition of DYNAMITE, and it comes your way tonight on TBS!
TBS CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH...
Mercedes Moné(c) vs. “The Native Beast” Nyla Rose
“The Native Beast” Nyla Rose has accomplished quite a bit in her tenure with All Elite Wrestling; she was part of the first Women's Match in AEW history at DOUBLE OR NOTHING 2019, she won the first Women's Casino Battle Royale at ALL OUT 2019 to earn her spot in the first AEW Women's World Championship match during the DYNAMITE premiere on October 2, 2019, and she ended the reign of Riho on February 12, 2020 to begin a 101-day reign of her own. She was a finalist in the 2021 Women's World Title Eliminator Tournament, losing to Ryo Mizunami in the Finals, a participant in both the 2023 and 2024 Owen Hart Foundation Women's Tournaments, as well as one in the original TBS Championship Tournament in December 2021.
Nyla was the first woman to score 100 wins in AEW's five-year history, she's currently tied with Thunder Rosa for the second most singles victories in the Women's Division at 60, and with 149 matches to date, has competed in more AEW bouts than any other woman. The only competitor even close is Skye Blue, and even after her COLLISION bout with Harley Cameron, Skye still sits twenty-two matches behind Nyla's benchmark. Suffice to say that “The Native Beast” has been one of the most fearsome competitors in All Elite Wrestling since day one, yet she's been unsuccessful in regaining the Women's World Championship in her three attempts since losing to Hikaru Shida at DOUBLE OR NOTHING 2020. Similarly, in the two and a half year history of the TBS Championship, Nyla has challenged for the title twice and been turned away both times.
It's a frustrating experience to reach the top of the mountain, but then fail to reach the summit any other time you've tried, yet that doesn't stop “The Native Beast” from continuing to fight her way up the mountainside and reach for every opportunity to stand once more at the peak. That's why tonight on DYNAMITE: 250, Nyla Rose will have match #150 against the reigning and defending TBS Champion Mercedes Moné!
Mercedes laid out this “Anyone But Britt” Open Challenge, and Rose did not hesitate to jump on the opportunity. Now Mercedes has looked strong in her AEW bouts so far, as if the time off recovering from injury only hardened her resolve to be the best rather than leaving ring rust clinging to her body. She came back strong with the DOUBLE OR NOTHING 2024 TBS Championship victory over Willow Nightingale, and followed that up just three days later with a successful title defense over Skye Blue. She put down Zeuxis on DYNAMITE two weeks after that, and then left FORBIDDEN DOOR 2024 with both the TBS Championship and the NJPW STRONG Women's Title in her possession after besting Stephanie Vaquer. “The CEO of AEW” is on a roll, no doubt about it, but Moné hasn't faced anyone like Nyla Rose since she came back from injury, maybe not even over the course of her nearly 14-year career.
Mercedes Moné is going to be tested like never before tonight when she stands across the ring from “The Native Beast”, and perhaps when it is said and done, if Nyla Rose stands as the first woman to hold both the AEW Women's World Championship and TBS Title, perhaps Moné will regret not allowing Dr. Britt Baker D.M.D to answer the Open Challenge...
TV TIME ONCE AGAIN!
Over the last few weeks, AEW fans have witnessed “The Learning Tree” Chris Jericho and his...branches...“The Redwood” Big Bill and “Bad Apple” Bryan Keith accomplish quite a bit. Though Jericho did manage to win the FTW Championship on his own at DYNASTY 2024, it is because of Big Bill that he retained against Katsuyori Shibata on the May 1st DYNAMITE, and it is because of Bryan Keith that he left DOUBLE OR NOTHING 2024 with the title still in his possession. It is because he's surrounded by those goons that Shibata is on the shelf, that HOOK is on the shelf, and that Samoa Joe has now joined them; as with pretty much every accomplishment Jericho has had in All Elite Wrestling, it's because of the people he's surrounded himself with rather than his own merit.
So while his 33 years of experience may offer the possibility of a great many lessons to pass down, are the ones Jericho chooses to teach the ones that benefit anyone other than himself? Big Bill and Bryan Keith have obviously found merit in sitting under this “Learning Tree”, and the rest of the wrestling world will join them tonight on DYNAMITE when Chris Jericho presents another edition of “TV Time”! What lessons will Jericho bestow upon the masses this time, and just how sanctimonious will he be in doing so?
DYNAMITE: 250 premieres at 8pm ET/7pm CT on TBS, so make a point to drop by AEW's official YouTube channel to watch highlights from previous editions of DYNAMITE, RAMPAGE, and COLLISION, as well as NJPW President Hiroshi Tanahashi as RJ City's guest on HEY!(EW), Dr. Britt Baker DMD getting CLOSE-UP with Renee Paquette, and so much more! Then join All Elite Wrestling at the Esports Stadium in Arlington, TX this Saturday night for the start our summer residency! It begins with an all-new COLLISION where Thunder Rosa will meet Deonna Purrazzo in a Lumberjack Match, and continues Friday July 26th with ROH's DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR pay-per-view extravaganza!
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