While All Elite Wrestling have been praised for having an incredibly deep roster, President Tony Khan has faced some criticism for how some of that roster has been introduced on television.
Fans were again quick to voice their frustration following the December 2nd edition of AEW Rampage. On the show Shane Taylor made his debut confronting Keith Lee to set up a tag team match at ROH Final Battle. Taylor arrived with little information about his character, leaving a number of fans confused.
Tony Khan Hits Back
During an appearance on the Battleground podcast, Tony Khan took the opportunity to hit back at this criticism. Khan claimed that what he’s doing was also prevalent in promotions such as WCW back in the 1990s, a not-so-subtle dig at one of his biggest critics Eric Bischoff.
“There are fans who have never seen Shane Taylor before, and that’s okay. You get introduced to new faces all the time. When I was a young wrestling fan, that was one of the things I liked about WCW Nitro. I think it would be very ironic now that the same promoter [Eric Bischoff] would tell you, you don’t want to see these faces or introduce new people on TV because they were the ones who did that.
A lot of times these new faces or read in a magazine, I’d never seen before and they would just walk out and wrestle on Nitro like it was perfectly natural and I thought it was the coolest thing. I guess that’s not acceptable anymore even though its much much easier to access information on the internet than it was in 1996,” he said
You saw wrestlers coming in from all promotions in the 90s on Nitro. Wrestlers coming to TBS or TNT is nothing new. People complaining about it ad nauseam on the internet is certainly new. At the end of the day, you want to listen to what the fans are saying. Overall, there has been a positive reception to a lot of international wrestlers coming to AEW.”
ROH Final Battle is set to take place on December 10th, and will be headlined by the ROH World Title clash between Chris Jericho and Claudio Castagnoli. Elsewhere on the show, Keith Lee will team with Swerve Strickland to take on Shane Taylor and JD Griffy.
H/t to Fightful