Only a few details were confirmed for Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite before its debut in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The promotion only announced that Blackpool Combat Club’s Jon Moxley and Claudio Castagnoli would face FTR’s Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler, AEW World Champion Samoa Joe, Swerve Strickland and Brian Cage will face Hangman Page, Hook, and Rob Van Dam, and Women’s World Champion Toni Storm and Deonna Purrazzo will compete.
While speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer mentioned that the show had undergone numerous changes due to injuries and other reasons. It was described as a chaotic backstage.
Meltzer said, “By the way, there’s a lot of stuff on the show tonight for various reasons. Sting was supposed to be in the show, but his father died, which we’ll get into in a second. So that’s why Ric Flair was there; Sting was supposed to be there. And then they did whatever they did, we’ll see if that leads into anything. There are a couple of other people. Jeff Hardy was supposed to be on the show in a key role. One of the reasons that so little was announced was because they didn’t know if Sting would be able to come, Jeff Hardy [injury], and Trent Beretta was supposed to do a singles match with Orange Cassidy. I have no idea why, but it’s been built up. [It was] not announced because they announced that Trent Beretta was injured, and they had done an injury thing on the show. But he was actually ill. And they were waiting until basically today. And that’s when they put Mike Bennett in that spot.
“I was told that it was very chaotic backstage, and the reason they didn’t announce anything is because so much of what they wanted to do, they didn’t know if they’d be able to do. So they didn’t want to false advertise unlike other things where if you don’t know, you just advertise it, and then well, you didn’t get cleared. So that’s why so little was advertised compared to most. And the show had a disorganized feeling because it really was.”
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
