Swerve Strickland, Hangman Page and the Real Winners and Losers from AEW All Out 2024

On the heels of a momentous All In pay-per-view from Wembley Stadium in London, All Elite Wrestling returned Saturday night with All Out, its second extravaganza in as many weeks, this one from Chicago.

Headlined by the Lights Out Steel Cage Match between Swerve Strickland and Hangman Page, as well as Bryan Danielson’s defense of the AEW World Championship against Jack Perry, the show brought several high-profile programs to a close while propelling others with long-reaching consequences forward.

It also left a handful of winners and losers, wrestlers whose utilization either positively or adversely affected them.

Who were those stars, which side did they fall on, and why?

Find out with this recap of the September 7 event.

Make no mistake about it: Daniel Garcia is a talented professional wrestler with a bright future, something that was on full display in his opening match against MJF. He showed an appropriate amount of intensity given the hatred that existed between them and went blow-for-blow with the former AEW champion, proving he belonged on that level.

He also lost the match and as a result, earned “loser” status on the night.

We have seen Garcia turn in star-making performances before. He has battled world champions, future Hall of Famers, and giants in the industry. He has given it his all, fired up, and looked the part of a star of the future, only to inevitably lose another high-profile match.

He has to win eventually or all of the effort that has gone into pushing him at different points in his AEW run will be for naught.

Saturday was the time for him to get that win; a victory that would have propelled him onward and upward. Instead, he fell for the same low blow that everyone does and ate another defeat.

Making matters worse was the post-match attempt to heat him back up, in which he blocked a low kick from MJF and proceeded to deliver a piledriver from the ropes before leaving through the crowd.

Why would Garcia be able to telegraph that low blow but not see the predictable one coming 30 seconds earlier? That he did only highlights how unsatisfying the finish and outcome of Saturday’s opener actually was.

Defenders of the match will point to the narrative of Garcia allowing his emotions to get the best of him but again, we have seen similar out of the Buffalo native before. He needs the big win and an evolution in his character to get to the next level in AEW because as we saw again in Chicago, the in-ring performance is already strong.

Expectations were lofty for Will Ospreay vs. Pac and true to the reputations they have developed over their careers, they lived up to them.

Pac targeted the neck and shoulder of Ospreay throughout the match but the resilient AEW international champion repeatedly fended off defeat and fought his way back into the match.

The fans in Chicago were into every spot, riding the rollercoaster of action along with the competitors, culminating in the Aerial Assassin delivering a Styles Clash and Hidden Blade for the win.

The tone of every AEW telecast changes when Ospreay takes to the ring, thanks to the excitement he brings to the arena. Saturday, he shared the ring with a wrestler in Pac who could match his athleticism and has his own resume of show-stealing efforts.

With great ability comes greater responsibility to deliver night in and night out. Two of the best wrestlers in the universe did just that in front of a grateful and appreciate Chicago audience.

Kris Statlander is too good to be as underutilized as she had been before the heel turn that ended her friendship with Willow Nightingale and necessitated their feud. Even the months-long program had felt rather one-sided, with the babyface shining in the highest profile moments, such as All In Wembley.

That changes Saturday in an intense, violent, hard-hitting Chicago Street Fight.

Statlander settled her differences with Nightingale, surviving a light tube attack, a nasty spill into a guardrail, and an uncomfortable bump into thumbtacks to wrap a steel chair around her opponent’s face and force a submission.

The win provides Statlander the sort of momentum she has not had since that initial heel turn.

Now is the time for Tony Khan and AEW creative to capitalize on her defining win and elevate her back into relevance in the women’s division and, perhaps, championship contention.

How that works with two heel champions remains to be seen but Statlander is one of the best in-ring workers in the division and should not be allowed to slink back into obscurity, especially after a win the magnitude of which we saw Saturday night.

Hikaru Shida is arguably the best women’s wrestler in AEW history.

She is unarguably its most decorated, winning three women’s world titles.

She is as consistently strong an in-ring performer as the company has produced and an AEW original.

Over the last year, though, she has been utilized as a means of getting others over. Her role has been to elevate her peers or lend them credibility. Saturday night, she was but the latest challenger to Mercedes Moné’s TBS Championship. She was neither the seasoned veteran enhancing her opponent or a believable challenger, thanks to the champion’s star power and the manner in which she has been haphazardly heated up, then cooled off.

Her loss to Moné, clean and in the center of the ring Saturday night in Chicago, did nothing to change that perception.

Shida is top-shelf professional wrestler and someone who should be better utilized, not to mention more consistently than she is. She is an asset to the company, which has taken the necessary steps to improve the women’s division here in 2024.

A foundational member of the division, she can be champions or challenger and everything in between.

For the sake of her legitimacy in the eyes of the audience, which has watched her lose too often without gaining much of anything from it over the last year Khan and Co. must deviate from their pattern of reintroducing her, then building her up, only to use her to put someone else over.

The return of Jon Moxley brought with it a renewed edge to the former AEW world champion, to the point that his place in the Blackpool Combat Club was in question. His recent association with Marina Shafir and the chaos they caused suggested he had moved onto bigger, more dangerous things than what Bryan Danielson, Wheeler Yuta, Claudio Castagnoli and satellite member Pac were involved with.

Moments after Danielson successfully defended the AEW World Championship against “Scapegoat” Jack Perry, it became clear that was not the case.

Moxley, Castagnoli, Pac, and Yuta arrived on the scene to prevent Christian Cage and The Patriarchy from stealing the title from The American Dragon by way of the heel’s guaranteed title opportunity. From there, however, the state of the BCC changed forever.

Castagnoli delivered an uppercut that stunned the champion before Moxley utilized a plastic bag in an attempted suffocation, all while Pac neutralized Yuta and Shafir laid out referee Bryce Remsburg. The commentary team denounced the actions of the group, with Jim Ross dropping expletives in disgust over the use of the bag.

In one angle, a BCC that felt disjointed and watered down of late rediscovered its sense of danger while simultaneously giving fans a sneak peek of what the final weeks/months of Danielson’s in-ring career might look like.

The wheels are in motion for Moxley to potentially be the star to dethrone his former teammate and make good on his claims that AEW no longer belongs to the people.

While there is an argument to be made that revamping BCC and letting them run wild over the roster in the same way they have over the last two years is not the answer to AEW’s creative shortcomings, having the stability that the group has and will continue to bring has to be welcome.

The hatred between Swerve Strickland and Hangman Page entering All Out was so intense that it demanded the first ever Lights Out Steel Cage Match. The only problem was that the violence the two had inflicted on each other over the course of their rivalry, dating back to last year had been so visceral and graphic that there were real questions about its ability to live up to the hype.

Even with the loftiest of expectations, it managed to.

Chairs, tables, a staple gun, a concrete block, and the steel confines of the cage itself all inflicted punishment on the combatants. Still, it felt relatively tame given all that fans had witnessed between them to that point.

Enter, the hypodermic needle.

Page retrieved it from his plastic box of implements and proceeded to stick it through the cheek of his opponent in a match that had even the toughest fans squirming. From there, he uncorked an unprotected steel chair shot to the head and the referee called for the bell, awarding the match to the villain.

Hangman took sickening pride in his actions and celebrated the win as if he had somehow been proven right; as if he was the conquering hero to Strickland’s vile heel. As Harvey Dent famously said in The Dark Knight, however, “you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

Page had long ago surpassed that and his actions in the main event were reflective of that.

Kudos to both participants for creatively playing on a spot from one of their previous encounters, when Strickland literally drank Page’s blood. Saturday, the latter repaid him by quite literally using a wooden stake from Swerve’s now-charred childhood home, as if he was attempting to extinguish Nosferatu.

The match-ending chair shot was a bit much, especially after we just witnessed Jack Perry get bludgeoned with one at the conclusion of the most recent Blood & Guts match, and AEW would be wise to lighten up on the depraved violence, but this was the main event it needed to be, featuring two guys whose rivalry has helped carry the promotion for the better part of a year.