.png)
Bryan Danielson and Daniel Garcia put on a tremendous wrestling match that split opinion. As mentioned in the title, it has cracked Cagematch's AEW Top 10 but it is sitting as AEW's 17th highest rated match by Grappl users. I think it was a spectacular battle that navigated and match use of the 2/3 falls stipulation extremely well, whereas Dave Meltzer only gave it 4.25 stars. In 2022, the best TV matches receive 4.5-5 stars from wrestlings leading critic!
Let's have a look at the numbers that underpinned Bryan Danielson and Daniel Garcia's thrid AEW clash:
The two men were presented as equals here, essentially cancelling each other out. Garcia had slightly more strikes, but Danielson had slightly more submission time. Danielson used a couple of dives but more of Garcia's strikes resulted in strikedown. The match boiled down to Danielson's ability to transition his offence into his wide array of finishing moves to secure the third fall.
Interestingly, each of the three falls had a slightly different identity:
- Fall one is remarkably even until Daniel Garcia pulls out the Dragon Sleeper to take control.
- Fall two sees Garcia seemingly take advantage of a Dragon Sleeper weakened Danielson before Danielson flash-pins him against the flow of the match.
- Fall three sees Danielson come more and more into the match as his younger opponent tires.
We are now going to compare this match with three somewhat similar contests:
Notable stats in Danielson/Garcia are:
- there plentiful usage of strikes.
- other metrics tend to be lower than the chosen comparisons.
- this match wasn't particularly dirty but did include lots of taunting and/or crowd interaction.
- how similar their offence was. Other matches have more contrasts between competitors.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, this match did crack the Cagematch Top 10 for AEW matches. Bryan Danielson vs Daniel Garcia dislodged the Young Bucks vs Lucha Bros at All Out 2019 as the tenth highest rated by Cagematch users:
