RADICAN’S TAKE: AEW’s blossoming women’s division, NJPW G1 Climax 34 youth movement

AEW WOMEN’S DIVISION HEATS UP

The AEW women’s divisions has heated up in the last couple of months. It felt like the division was directionless not too long ago, but the return of Britt Baker has given the division another big anchor to rely on alongside Mercedes Mone and Toni Storm.

I haven’t felt invested in the storytelling AEW has done in the women’s division for the most part since Baker feuded with Thunder Rosa. That changed when Mariah May turned on Toni Storm after winning The Owen Hart Cup.

I expected May to turn on her mentor Storm at some point, but her sudden and violent turn on Storm while they were celebrating her win of The Owen Hart Cup set the stage for a big match was unexpected, especially for how violent it was. Storm bled a ton to sell May’s attack.

The follow up on TV in recent weeks has been well done, but the problem facing AEW CEO and booker Tony Khan now is how does he keep the feud hot with several weeks left before The All In takes place on Aug. 25 in London?

The feud for AEW TBS Championship between Mercedes Mone and Britt Baker is another big match in the women’s division that I’m looking forward to. The feud has led to Mone officially turning heel and last weekend at the San Diego Comic Con, AEW ran an angle where Mone confronted Baker and Tony Khan ended up making the match official for the All In PPV.

The debut of former NWA Women’s Champion Kamille as Mercdes Mone’s muscle on Dynamite last week was impressive. Kamille had a strong run as NWA Women’s Champion that went under the radar that saw her hold the title for over 800 days before being defeated.

Kamille has put her time in waiting for an opportunity on a bigger stage, as she has previously been used as a manager during the Sinclair era of ROH and then broke out in NWA as an in-ring performer. She looked impressive while attacking Baker from behind and it will be interesting to see what Kamille can do on the national stage now that she’s broken through to get a contract from a wrestling company with major exposure.

AEW has developed two huge women’s matches for All In and I’m excited for them both. Mone is no slouch in the ring and now that she’s a heel champion, she is going to be even more dangerous with Kamille in her corner. Mone and Kamille are likely going to be a difficult combination for Baker or any other challengers in the future to overcome.

NJPW G1 CLIMAX 34 THOUGHTS (THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT)

How about that young talent in NJPW. Those that have stuck through and watched NJPW have been waiting for talent to develop and rise to the top with the top of the card wiped clean in the last couple of years by AEW. Jay White left NJPW in 2023 and in 2024 AEW signed Kazuchika Okada and Will Ospreay leaving NJPW with well…not a lot left to work with.

Sanada’s reign as a champion in 2023 was a failure. IWGP World Hvt. Champion Tetsuya Naito is so banged up from years of wear and tear on his body that it’s hard for him to to have high quality matches on a consistent basis. Hiroshi Tanahashi, NJPW’s Ace, is even more banged up than Naito and isn’t even in the G1 this year, so the G1 Climax should be the time where some of the young talent in the company gets a push during the tournament.

Yota Tsuji, Yuya Uemura, and Ren Narita have all tried and failed to capture the IWGP World HVt. Championship in the last year. Jon Moxley was brought in earlier this year as a short-term bandaid champion. Going into the G1 Climax tournament this year, I felt NJPW has to push some new blood during the tournament and they have.

It wasn’t any of the Reiwa Three Musketeers that surprised me with their run in G1 during the first week of the tournament. Yuya Uemura was easily one of the bigger surprises, but it wasn’t just the fact that he put together a three match winning streak, which is good for the top spot on the B block leaderboard, but it is the manner in which he is wrestling that is impressive.

Uemura has come across as bland in the past, but he has started to show more of an edge when he wrestles where he has credibility as someone you don’t want to mess with. This new edge was on display on night 4 of the tournament on July 24 when he wrestled AEW’s Konoske Takeshita.

Takeshita brought the fight out of Uemura big time and Uemura ended up pulling off what I would consider to be a pretty big upset given the caliber of wrestler that Takeshita has shown himself to be in AEW.

Takeshita is a bad man in the ring at all times and Uemura showed on night 4 of the G1 Climax 34 that he could match that energy, as he pinned him following a lengthy back and forth war with his deadbolt finisher. I don’t expect Uemura to win the tournament, but he’s shown enough that NJPW booker Gedo should push him harder in the future.

Honorable mention for unexpected performance in the tournament goes to Oleg Boltin and Callum Newman. Both don’t have much of a track record at all in terms of major singles matches in NJPW and are usually found lower on the card in tags, but both men have impressed during the early stages of the tournament.

Both men have compiled two wins and four points to date in the tournament on opposite sides of the blocks, which is a bit of a surprise. Oleg in the B had back-to-back impressive performances in the ring against Hirooki Goto in defeat on July 25 and then he pulled off an impressive win over veteran wrestler ELP on July 28 in one of his best matches to date.

Newman picked up a big win over Shingo Takagi on June 27. The crowd in Nagasaki wasn’t great, but Newman’s performance was and his match with Takagi deserved a better reaction than it got.

Newman hasn’t shown a lot of charisma and he doesn’t have the type of look you’d expect out of someone that NJPW would push, but performances like the one he had against Takagi could lead to bigger things for him in the future or at the very least it shows promise he could be a valuable singles wrestler on the NJPW roster that establishes credibility so that he can be used up and down the card. NJPW needs to establish wrestlers on all levels of the roster, which is going to continue to be a big task on their “to do” list moving forward.

Contact PWTorch columnist Sean Radican at pwtorchsean@gmail.com. Follow him on X @SR_Torch