All Elite Wrestling and NJPW held their Forbidden Door PPV on Sunday, June 26, with Excalibur, NJPW’s Kevin Kelly and Taz calling the action for the entire event, while Tony Schiavone and Jim Ross joined them in a number of matches towards the end of the show. The trend continued during Wednesday’s Blood & Guts episode of AEW Dynamite, which was also the post-Forbidden Door show, with Tony Schiavone, Taz and Excalibur calling the action during the show’s entire first hour, while “Good Ole’ J.R.” Jim Ross and William Regal joined them for the Blood & Guts Main Event Matchup, which would take up the entire second hour of the broadcast.
The WWE Hall of Famer would then receive a huge reaction from the fans in attendance and it was later announced that the wrestling legend will be calling the action during the entire AEW Rampage as well, which was taped immediately following AEW Dynamite this past Wednesday, but aired this past Friday on TNT.
AEW Rampage’s announce team is usually made up of Excalibur and Taz, with AEW Stars Chris Jericho and Ricky Starks being part of the announce booth from time to time, but the FTW Champion competed in the Royal Rampage Match, while Jericho was technically only a few minutes removed from a grueling Blood & Guts Match. Last Friday night’s AEW Rampage announce team was made up of Jim Ross, Excalibur and Tony Schiavone, which is AEW Dynamite’s usual announce team.
Dave Meltzer noted on a recent edition of the Wrestling Observer Radio Program that the reason behind this is AEW is experimenting with their commentary team by doing a little bit of a shakeup, though it wasn’t revealed if this will only be happening for this previous week’s AEW programming or if this is what the company will be doing on a permanent and regular basis going forward.
