NJPW star Rocky Romero has provided some additional details on Kenny Omega’s upcoming matchup against Will Ospreay at tomorrow’s WrestleKingdom 17 pay-per-view.
The CHAOS member and liaison between NJPW and AEW spoke with Fightful about this topic, which included him revealing how difficult it was to keep The Cleaner’s storyline with Ospreay going following his suspension from AEW due to the incident with CM Punk at ALL OUT. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
Says Omega knew he wanted to do a program with Ospreay at some point due to the long-term storytelling it would implicate:
Kenny kind of knew where he wanted to go storyline was, but the pieces of the puzzle weren’t really put together. Kenny kind of foresaw [working with NJPW and Will Ospreay], probably not knowing when it could actually happen, but maybe in the next year. Kenny missed Forbidden Door because he was injured. He was probably thinking way ahead, not knowing when. That just shows the genius of Kenny Omega. He’s kind of thinking long-term, always. He’s the type of guy who is playing chess while everyone is playing checkers. Obviously, when the conversation starts to happen, could this be a matchup at Wrestle Kingdom? Yes, maybe, possibly. We start getting the ball rolling and all of a sudden, the Elite and Punk thing happens, and now it’s like, nobody knows, but if he does come back, he could most likely do Wrestle Kingdom in time. Nobody knew for six or eight weeks, whatever it was, it felt like forever. Everybody was pretty stressed out about it because that’s one of the key matches to Wrestle Kingdom. Been a lot of stress.
How Omega’s suspension from ALL OUT put a pause on things and added stress:
It [Omega’s suspension in AEW] definitely put a pause on things. There was definitely a pause on things because nobody knew what was going to happen and what the timeline was going to be, realistically. I didn’t want to be the person pushing, prying and being like, ‘Don’t forget,’ because it was obviously a very sensitive subject and what everybody went through with that wasn’t a good situation for anybody. It was a touchy subject and I didn’t want to be like, ‘Hey, what about Wrestle Kingdom?’ Thank God it all unfolded quickly and we were able to get back on track super quickly. Kenny’s manager [Barry Bloom] is super great to work with and we worked with him when we did the (Chris) Jericho deal. There is a good relationship there and he was great about communicating between AEW and New Japan as well and keeping everyone on track. There was a lot of trust there and built before, it was easy to work with because putting a deal like that together in four weeks, a lot of moving parts and contracts going back and forth, and all the red tape, it takes a lot of time, but there was enough trust of ‘we know where we’re going, this is our end goal, we’re going to make it happen and make sure everyone is happy when we get there.’ Obviously, with the situation with the guys being suspended or out, it definitely didn’t help, but we got there. He’s going to be there.
