Summerslam vs Forbidden Door | Brock Lesnar vs Roman Reigns In-ring Statistics.

This morning I watched the main event of Summerslam as well as skipping through to see little bits of the rest. The only thing that merits comment out with the main event (I didn't watch Becky/Bianca, I hear its very good.) is the bizarre decision to rename Io Shirai as Iyo Sky. The taking of a Japanese surname and anglicising it seems off to me. Shirai is a great name to say anyway, more than manageable to non-Japanese speakers...

The main event was a gigantic spectacle. It was fascinating and somewhat peculiar as a non-WWE watcher. The beginning felt disconnecting, both men hit 'big' moves using weapons but it didn't feel impactful or significant. This changed throughout the match as this started to feel impactful and noteworthy, perhaps they should have paced themselves instead of putting each other through tables so soon?

The In-ring Statistics from this match reveals the strategy at play here. It's all about the big moves and the large wrestler's ability to take them. The stipulation assists with this as it allows recovery time.

The match didn't have a huge amount of back and forth. It was rather devoid of the competitive struggle for advantage or sequences of reversals to avoid damage. Instead, this one, revolved around each wrestler, but Lesnar in particular, dishing out visually impressive sequences of damage.

Roman's role in this is to absorb these large impacts and to use the referee's counts to recover. The match offence paint's Roman in better light than the majority of the match; if you look at Roman's out put from minutes 7-18, he does little.

You can see, even more starkly, the difference between AEWxNJPW's Forbidden Door main event and yesterday's Summerslam main event in the raw notes for the two matches:

Perhaps more simply digested are the images below. In which we can see that Lesnar and Reigns' more extreme Last Man Standing match utilised more big grapples and strikedowns, whereas AEW's more wrestling based show saw strike exchanges, more placed big moves and more reversals. Interestingly, the non-WWE effort also saw significantly more crowd work from the two competitors.

When comparing the two matches' Flow of Offence graphs we can see that the AEW match had more measured ups and downs whereas the WWE match saw more absolute exchanges of larger offence totals. The match stats totals in the matches' totals to the right (Mox/Tana is missing the correct title) show that the complexity of the AEWxNJPW match is more than the WWE's across all three metrics. It hits lower highs but cumulatively surpasses it's peer.

Thank you for checking out this statistical comparison of AEWxNJPW and WWE. Follow us on Twitter @PWMusings and check in with the website for much more Unique Wrestling Analysis.