AEW Rampage: The women stole the show in a street fight again

On the New Year’s Eve episode of AEW: Rampage in 2021, Tay Melo and Anna Jay were in a street fight with Penelope Ford and The Bunny in the main event.

On the second Rampage of 2023, TayJay once again main evented in a street fight. This time, it was against Ruby Soho and Willow Nightingale. Soho and Melo have beef because Melo broke Soho’s nose at Full Gear. Soho missed several months after having her nose surgically reconstructed.

In recent weeks, Soho has begrudgingly teamed up with Nightingale. They looked to continue their winning streak on Friday and started off the match by attacking their opponents from behind as Jay and Melo walked down the ramp.

The match became bloody quickly when Melo did a double stomp on Soho while her head was in a trash can. Jay followed up with a barbed wire Queen Slayer on Nightingale, the move that won her the first street fight. Nightingale backed her into the turnbuckle to save her neck (literally).

The women really showed out in this match with Nightingale taking down the other three women onto chairs. Melo hit a Gotch Style Piledriver on Soho through a table. Nightingale had set up a table on the side of the ramp early in the match. She remembered this later on and took Jay with her to the ramp. Nightingale hit a powerbomb off the side of the stage, except she took the brunt of it and Jay completely missed the table and hit her head and back on the floor.

Meanwhile, in the ring, Melo introduced a bag of thumbtacks to the match. This would be to her detriment as Soho hit the Destination Unknown onto the tacks to get the win.

Women’s street fights in AEW are few and far between, as are women main eventing on TV. It’s good to see AEW building women’s stories outside of the two women’s titles. When women are given opportunities, they show up and show out. They should be highlighting more of the women’s division and building stories for them. Hopefully, this becomes more of the norm for AEW.

On the same night as Rampage, IMPACT Wrestling had women main event a pay-per-view at one of their biggest shows of the year. AEW has yet to have women main event a pay-per-view. The year 2023 should be a year of growth for women’s wrestling across promotions all over the globe. Hopefully, AEW can follow suit and continue building a stronger women’s division.