Christian Cage Saved AEW Title From The Scrapheap

Christian Cage has addressed criticism of his AEW debut and thinks he answered his critics with his run as TNT Champion.

Before AEW Revolution in 2021, Paul Wight promised he was bringing in a “hall of fame worthy talent” to the company. Cue rumours galore as fans tried to decipher who was joining the company and if they’d live up to Wight’s hype.

At Revolution, that talent was revealed to be WWE’s former World Heavyweight Champion Christian Cage. Cage walked to out and signed his contract with many fans pleased to see him sign up to AEW just weeks after his last appearance in WWE at the 2021 Royal Rumble. However, as with everything in wrestling, you can’t please everyone and some were unhappy, feeling that Cage was a letdown from what had been promised.

Speaking to Chris Van Vliet, Christian Cage gave his thoughts on the situation and noted it was just part of the wrestling business, you can’t make everyone happy:

You know how wrestling fans are, right? Nothing’s ever good enough. So when my name was announced, there were some people that were thinking it was going to be somebody else, maybe hoping it was going to be somebody else. I mean, there were a lot of people who were happy with me too.

But when you do something like that, that’s not a surprise. When you hype something, you’re giving people the opportunity to have an opinion. Either good or bad and they’re gonna voice that after. I heard all those things that were said after, that maybe it wasn’t big enough for the hype and all those sorts of things.

Christian Cage Saved TNT Title From Obscurity

Cage then pointed to his run as TNT Champion, saying that he saved the title from irrelevancy and took it to a pay-per-view main event. Christian Cage noted he took great delight in making his critics eat their words during that run:

When we were doing these press conferences after I took the TNT Championship, which was basically thrown on the scrapheap, and I revived that title to make it at one point, I’ll die on this hill, that it was as prestigious, if not more prestigious than the world title when I had that run. We were main eventing WrestleDream with it. We were sitting in the scrum after and I had my opportunity to basically say there were people and there’s a lot probably a lot of people in this room that thought that the signing was overhyped, and I just wanted to make them eat their words.

Christian Cage failed to dethrone Swerve Strickland for the AEW World Championship at Double Or Nothing which was his first match since losing the TNT Title to Adam Copeland in an I Quit match back on Dynamite in March.