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At AEW Dynamite: Quake at the Lake, Jon Moxley took on Chris Jericho in a very well received AEW Interim World Championship defence. In his 'Lionheart' persona, Jericho really took it to Moxley in the story of the match. Below we are going to look at how the Jon Moxley character was able to be so vulnerable last night, even though CM Punk's return was imminent.
Moxley gave up 26% of the total offence to Chris Jericho, but that is only the beginning of the story. Moxley hit only 5 big offence moves that were not holding submission for 10 seconds; 3 strikedowns, a grapple and a dive. Even Moxley's bigger offensive metrics are not more plentiful than Jericho's corresponding tallies. This is all quite remarkable, but still, it's not the biggest concession Moxley made to Jericho.
In the 13th minute of the contest, the broadcast went to commercial with Jon Moxley being locked in the Walls of Jericho. When the broadcast came back late in the 16th minute, Jon Moxley was still stuck in the Walls of Jericho. In the two applications of the Walls between minutes 13 and 17, Moxley was in the hold for a total of 182 seconds.
That's 182 seconds of fans seeing Moxley being ground into the mat by Chris Jericho in 'picture in picture' or, internationally, in full screen via Fite. It's an incredibly hard thing to do, to put across the hold as convincing for 3 full minutes. Then having your champion being physically held down for three minutes in the middle of a match is a heck of a thing for them to be able to absorb and not feel significantly diminished by the end.
Moxley then took more punishment post-match and had to be rescued by the 'other' World Champion, CM Punk. Yet when he disrespected Punk and walked away holding his version of the World Championship over his shoulder, it felt justified, for he has been there from the beginning and has been a fighting champion.
The above charts also show Moxley's concessions throughout the match, note Jericho's near full domination from minutes 13 to 17. The rise and fall of the matches' pace is also, pleasingly mapped out.
In these charts you can see a sample of other Moxley performances this year. He gives nothing like the share of the offence to his opponent's like he did for Jericho. His strength in the Tanahashi match is particularly noteworthy due to the stature of his opponent.
The per hour numbers for the above samples give a more accurate picture of how the Moxley performances stack up against each other. You will see that his striking and grapple numbers against Jericho were nowhere near as ferocious as usual, for example.
In conclusion, all of this goes to show how unusual Moxley's performance against Chris Jericho was. Especially on a night that you would want him to look unbeatable to build anticipation for his forthcoming clash with CM Punk.
Yet Moxley could build Jericho and his match with Punk in the same night. Sue to the incredible work he has done this year.
Appendix - Raw recording of statistics:
Walkthrough of how this all works here.
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