Will Ospreay’s main story is his rivalry, and seemingly now, broken friendship, with Kenny Omega going into their AEW World Championship match at All In, but “The Aerial Assassin’s” other major story in recent weeks and months, his relationship with the Death Riders, felt seriously overlooked tonight. Coming off the big breakup angle between Ospreay and Moxley at AEW Redemption, it felt pretty weird.
Obviously, there’s no real way to do Moxley vs. Ospreay before Wembley Stadium, but there has to be some way to keep up Ospreay’s momentum with the leader of the Death Riders, assuming Moxley is his first challenger post-All In when he wins the title. Maybe the story with Omega is just too big to do so, but it seems like they’re trying to do something there, as Ospreay is facing Daniel Garcia on “Collision.” But Garcia is no Moxley.
Even before that segment with Garcia’s challenge, however, the Death Riders opened the show with a pretty anti-climactic confrontation with their now-former member. Garcia called him “young boy, Bill,” which he’d call him again later in the night, which grated on my nerves in a way I’m sure it’s supposed to, and Ospreay hit him for it.
Moxley held PAC back from Ospreay, who told Moxley he “didn’t get to pull the trigger for him,” and he gave back the patch and said he was “out.” Then, the Death Riders kind of just walked away, and Ospreay got into a much more interesting conversation with “Hangman” Adam Page, something the Detroit crowd was more interested in.
In their backstage segment later, Garcia challenged Ospreay and was the one to address him, saying that Ospreay always walks away from things when they get hard. Seems like something Moxley could have said, in a much more eloquent way, but if AEW wanted to get to the match tomorrow, I guess that made sense. Moxley then didn’t speak about “The Aerial Assassin” at all, and instead talked about the “morality police” and said he was tired of talking about the way they do things compared to how others do them. It just, again, felt weird for him to not address the major elephant in the room.
Maybe Ospreay goes through the Death Riders, one-by-one in the weeks leading up to All In, then goes face-to-face with Moxley once he has the title. It just seems rather prolonged, however, and like AEW was trying to do too much with two different stories, with not enough time between Redemption and All In.
Written by Daisy Ruth
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