Hello, and welcome to the AEW Rampage and Battle of the Bilt review, I'm Adam Willow from What Cool To Join by one of the dailywise Michael Siddwick from What Cool To Do,

everything that happened on Friday's episodes of AEW Rampage and Battle of the Bilt Fowl, but before you enter here if you're a fan of this sort of thing,

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Well, I'm only going to quiz, of course, on WrestleCulture, as I said though, Join by Siddwick to review Rampage and Battle of the Bilts.

I want to sound really patronising here. What a bloody great show!

To absolutely fantastic shows, I am going to, I think, in bear in mind, this is me talking about AEW, I'm going to sound when I record this podcast,

like such a goddamn moron, that one for my own reputation, I feel like it's necessary to do this, I'm because I really want to point this out.

I'm going to start out this review of two incredibly well received shows by having a bit of a piss and moan, right?

I, when was it, November-ish, remember tweeting, when Athena threw down Aubrey Edwards on Rampage, and on a show that at the time was absolutely dead,

in terms of the noise, interest level, buzz, whatever, it was like shocked at how much of a pop that generated.

I was so impressed because they'd been so observant of a, kind of, an unwritten rule. We are going to treat our referees with respect.

Yes, they're idiotic. Even by the standards of a wrestling referee, their characters are pretty stupid, but they're not just Rousseau-esque targets of HTT,

beat them up, beat them up, beat them up. They'd been, even if they didn't have any credibility in terms of the audience and how they were seen to uphold the rules,

the wrestlers, at least, had respect for them. Obviously, they were cheating around them, they were trying to fool them, but they would never lay their hands on them.

So when Athena did, it was a massive deal, and I was so impressed by them.

Because A, W, as much as I love it, it's an extremely excessive promotion. There's no getting around that.

But I thought, you know what, they can just use this sparingly. They've globbed onto something, globbed onto something rather here.

And then there's been the odd example here and there. Since that, I thought, all right, okay, they've now fallen head over heels with how effective this is.

And my worry is that they're going to keep doing it until it just becomes yet another thing that just gets a reaction, but nothing like the reaction that Athena got.

There was an element in the tag team title match, jumping ahead to battle in the belt. So I thought, you son of a bitch, that is genius.

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