The ‘Anarchy In The Arena’ match at AEW Double or Nothing 2023, featuring The Elite (Kenny Omega, Hangman Page and The Young Bucks) and the Blackpool Combat Club (Bryan Danielson, Jon Moxley, Claudio Castagnoli and Wheeler Yuta), has drawn extremely polarizing reactions from wrestling fans and critics alike.
While the match was awarded the coveted five-star rating on the ‘Meltzer Scale,’ esteemed veteran Jim Cornette, notorious for his views on modern and hardcore wrestling, unsurprisingly layeth the verbal smackdown while talking about the match on a recent episode of his “The Jim Cornette Experience” podcast. He said,
“The fight started in the stands because The Elite went up to meet [BCC], they fight in stands, all eight guys and you can’t see anything and the cameras are trying to cut back and forth and the band is still playing and there’s bad indie wrestling everywhere going on. It’s the wet dream of any outlaw indie mud show wrestler to be on TV and do this stuff that they all do.”
One particular instance during the match featured referee Rick Knox execute a rather obvious blade job, and Cornette was none too pleased about the spot. He said,
“Then there’s Claudio, poor Claudio, who has such talent goddamnit…and he’s holding the corpse referee Rick Knox, that desiccated f**king liver motherf**ker, and he’s done a blade job, it was only a pap smear, but the referee is bleeding. But I bet you, because he’s a mark friend of The Buckeroos… I guarantee you he went up to them and said, ‘Can I bleed tonight too? It’s gonna be badass.’”