In a recent appearance on The Sessions with Renee Paquette podcast, former AEW World Champion Kenny Omega discussed at length the underwhelming ending to his ‘Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch’ with Jon Moxley at AEW Revolution. He said,
“I was so proud of the match; I was so worried about the match because I’m not really like a hardcore guy. I’m the guy that’s scared of needles… When I’m getting thrown into barbed wire and things like that in the heat of the moment, sure, but going into a match knowing that this might happen and this might happen and this might happen and I’m thinking worst-case scenario like wow, that could catch on fire or you know, I could smear my face off or whatever, I could get completely shredded by barbed wire if I get completely tangled in it. I was scared of stuff like that.”
Omega noted how he never even anticipated a fumble of such disastrous magnitude by the production crew, that resulted in the pyro essentially never going off as Eddie Kingston ran out to the ring to save Jon Moxley from the impending explosion, resulting in perhaps the most underwhelming ending to any show in AEW history.
“But the one thing that I never thought would happen and I should’ve considered it was what if all this stuff that they have prepared, that they have done rehearsals for, that I know they’ve done rehearsals for, what if for some reason on the day of, that doesn’t work? It never popped into my mind, that feeling, that thought. You just think that the stuff that you can’t control is gonna be there for you, you know what I mean… I’m trying to worry about what can I do to control the unknown? The thing I can’t control, any sort of technical aspect of the match, I can’t do that so I’m just trusting that all of these people that have the know-how and have been tasked to do this can pull it off.”
He mentioned that there was an initial idea that had been rehearsed in the days leading up to Revolution, but “the boss” suggested a different idea on the day of the show to make it ‘look better.’ He noted that he initially thought that the pyrotechnics did not go off due to strong winds at Daily’s Place, but was shocked and chagrined when he heard the real reason.
“When I heard the real reason, where it was like, the boss who was not there from full rehearsals had then showed up to the actual real-life show and he had said, ‘I’ve got a way to make this look even better’ and that was his idea. I was like, ‘Wait, you decided on the spot? When you didn’t know the idea, you didn’t see the rehearsal and that’s the direction you decided to go in?’ And yes, there were misfires within his new idea that he decided but, I wish we just would have done what we practiced.”
