Mercedes Mone finally has the one belt that kept getting away from her.
Mone submitted Willow Nightingale at Wembley Stadium to win the AEW Women’s World Championship. She earned the shot by winning the Owen Hart Cup for a second straight year, after losing last year’s All In title match to Toni Storm.
Nightingale walked in hurt. She had been nursing a broken hand and came to the ring with it heavily bandaged. Mone worked it all match, then started pulling the cast apart to get at it directly.
The champion had the better of the opening. She knocked Mone off the top rope to the floor, followed with a senton off the apron, then swung her into the barricade. Mone came back into the ring bleeding from above her nose, busted open the hard way.
Mone exposed a turnbuckle and sent Nightingale into it to take over. She stayed on the hand and kept the champion grounded until Nightingale stood up with her on her back. They spilled to the floor off a suplex from the apron. A bodyslam off the middle rope and a missile dropkick got Nightingale a two count.
The closing stretch got messy. Mone went for the title belt, Nightingale took it off her and used it, and then hit her finisher with referee Aubrey Edwards too slow to make the count. Nightingale followed with a powerbomb into the exposed buckle and climbed up top, and Mone countered her with a hurricanrana.
That was all she needed. Mone locked in the Statement Maker in the middle of the ring, Nightingale could not break the hold, and Edwards called it.
Mone has now collected every title AEW has for the women’s division. The one at the top of it took her the longest.
