With a spot in the final at All In on the line, Jon Moxley takes on Claudio Castagnoli and Kyle O’Reilly meets Nigel McGuinness. Plus, Swerve Strickland faces off with Jack Perry. You can catch AEW Dynamite on Wednesday night at 8 p.m. ET/ 5 p.m. PT on TSN2, the TSN App, and TSN.ca
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Continental Cup semifinals match: AEW Continental Champion Jon Moxley vs. Claudio Castagnoli
The blind draw of the inaugural Continental Cup has created a number of intriguing matchups, but none might be more interesting than Wednesday night’s all-Death Riders battle. Jon Moxley, still the AEW Continental Champion, goes one-on-one with stablemate Claudio Castagnoli. The winner moves on to Sunday’s final at All In at Wembley Stadium.
Every match in this tournament has effectively been a title match for Moxley and Wednesday night’s will be no different. Moxley has held the Continental title since defeating Kazuchika Okada in the final of the 2025 Continental Classic at last December’s Worlds End. Since then, Moxley has defended his title successfully on seven occasions (nine, if you include Continental Cup bouts as title matches). If Moxley were to lose at any stage of the Continental Cup, his title is gone.
To reach the final four of the tournament, Moxley has been forced to battle. In the first round on the Aug. 12 edition of Dynamite, Mox fended off a spirited challenge from Jack Perry. The former TNT Champion gave Moxley his best shot, but a bloodied and bruised Perry ultimately passed out in the Bulldog Choke. Then on last week’s Dynamite, Moxley took on former IWGP World Champion Jay White. By the end, the match was a breathless encounter. Moxley managed to lock in the Bulldog, but White powered out with Moxley laying him out again with a Death Rider. He finally put White into a rear-naked choke and the Bang Bang Gang leader went to sleep.
Castagnoli’s tournament started on the Aug. 8 edition of Collision. The former CMLL World Heavyweight Champion had his hands full with the Bang Bang Gang’s Ace Austin. In a classic power-versus-speed match, After a number of near-falls, Castagnoli eventually got the victory with a brutal-looking Swiss Death.
Castagnoli’s second-round opponent ended up being a great surprise. He had originally been schedule to face off with eternal rival Eddie Kingston, but the former AEW Triple Crown Champion wasn’t medically cleared to compete. Rather than simply award Castagnoli a bye to the semis, AEW booker Tony Khan made a play-in match on this past Friday night’s Ring of Honor Death Before Dishonor pay-per-view where Daniel Garcia got the better of Adam Priest.
In Saturday night’s all-Death Riders match, neither Castagnoli nor Garcia held back, despite some early hesitation from the latter. As the match continued, it got progressively brutal. Castagnoli began to target Garcia’s ankle and that played into the finish. After a deadlift power bomb, Castagnoli applied a Sharpshooter, but shifted his weight as a means to grapevine the injured ankle of Garcia. It proved to be too much and the former TNT Champion was forced to tap out.
Wednesday’s match between the two men will be just the second ever. The previous match also came in a tournament situation. Castagnoli was victorious over Moxley in Blue League action from the 2025 Continental Cup.
A Death Rider will advance to Sunday’s final, but who will it be?
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Continental Cup semifinals match: Kyle O’Reilly vs. Nigel McGuinness
In the other semi-final, it’s a meeting of former ROH World Champions. Burnaby, BC’s Kyle O’Reilly takes on Nigel McGuinness in a first-time matchup. For McGuinness, winning Wednesday night’s match means wrestling for a championship in his hometown at Sunday’s PPV.
O’Reilly’s path to the Continental Cup semis has not been an easy one. The former AEW World Trios Champion was forced to go through his Conglomeration stablemates. Despite the close friendships of those involved, emotions ran high.
In the first round, O’Reilly came up against longtime tag partner Roderick Strong in the main event of the Aug. 15 Collision. The two men beat the holy hell out of one another in order to claim the victory. Finally, a series of cradles that were reversed and then reversed again ended with O’Reilly claiming the three count. A frustrated Strong shoved O’Reilly to the mat after the match before pulling him back up to embrace him.
Orange Cassidy was up next for O’Reilly last week on Collision. As it does often, Cassidy’s deceptive technical prowess came to the forefront as he frustrated fellow technician O’Reilly. O’Reilly began to focus on Cassidy’s ankle and that proved to be the path to victory. After quite some time in the hold, Cassidy would tap out to O’Reilly’s grapevined ankle lock. O’Reilly broke the hold as soon as the bell rang to ensure he didn’t do any unnecessary damage to his stablemate.
While O’Reilly and McGuinness both spent years in ROH, they never crossed paths with the former entering the promotion just as the latter left in 2009. Despite never having met before, each man is well aware of what the other brings to the table. Wednesday night’s match should be a clinic.
Will McGuinness get one step closer to living out a dream or will O’Reilly turn it into a nightmare?
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Swerve Strickland (w/ Prince Nana) vs. “Jungle” Jack Perry
Jack Perry’s loss to Jon Moxley in the Continental Cup came with a silver lining. Bloodied and bruised, Perry never gave up. While he ultimately passed out in the Bulldog Choke, he earned Mox’s respect, offering him a handshake after the match. On top of that, it proved to Perry that he could hang with the best that AEW has to offer.
As he was about to be stitched up after the match, cameras caught up with Perry backstage where he said that the loss to Moxley did nothing to dissuade his dream of becoming AEW World Champion. In order to make that a reality, he said, he would need to test his mettle against other former and current champions, mentioning Samoa Joe, “Hangman” Adam Page, his Elite stablemate Kenny Omega and...Swerve Strickland, who just happened to arrive on the scene.
Strickland told Perry that, while his performance against Moxley was impressive, he wasn’t ready to “walk with killers like us” just yet. An undaunted Perry disagreed, but Swerve left him with a warning. Strickland implored Perry not to bring a knife “to a Swerve fight” before walking off with a laugh.
This past Saturday night on Collision, Perry approached Strickland in the back. He told he thought a lot about what he had to say and acknowledged that Swerve was a self-made man. But Perry told him he needed to beat people like him to make his dream a reality and he challenged him to a match on Dynamite. Impressed with Perry’s bravado, Strickland accepted.
Wednesday’s match will be the first singles meeting between the two men. They’ve met in the past, but all of those were multi-man matches. Strickland holds a 2-1 mark in those encounters.
What’s interesting about the match is that it comes in the midst of a period of intrigue as to what’s next for Strickland. On last Wednesday’s Dynamite, Strickland interrupted a promo segment by the AEW World Trios Champions Page, Brody King and Bandido. Page concluded his remarks with an open challenge for All In to any team that wanted a match. Strickland threw his hat in the ring, despite not having any obvious partners. Might we discover just who he has in mind on Dynamite?
Can Perry prove he can hang with killers or will Strickland show him he’s bitten off more than he can chew?
