Willow Nightingale has accomplished a lot in AEW, and becoming one of the first two women to officially compete in an Anarchy in the Arena match is one of them. Nightingale, alongside Kenny Omega, Swerve Strickland, and The Opps’ Samoa Joe, Powerhouse Hobbs, and Katsuyori Shibata defeated the Death Riders and Young Bucks team at Double or Nothing in May. Nightingale recently spoke about the match with Blavity, and said she didn’t realize the gravity of the moment until she was on the other side of it.
“Looking around the room and seeing who I was teaming with was mind-boggling,” she explained. “I saw on Twitter somebody referred to us as, if AEW had assembled their Avengers, this is the team that they would’ve picked. And I was like, ‘That’s crazy.’ To look around at people like that — [Samoa] Joe, Kenny [Omega], really everyone on the team. When you look around and think about how these are people that you’ve admired for years, and then you’re like, ‘Oh, but I am not just looking up to them. I am their peer.'”
Nightingale told the outlet that in the weeks she was working with her Anarchy in the Arena teammates, who she called much more experienced with knowledge to hand down to her, she tried to absorb everything should could, from the way they carried themselves to the way they talked to other people. She said she felt like it was all very important to pick up on, as there aren’t women’s wrestling veterans with as long of careers as some of the men.
“In women’s wrestling, now it’s changing a little bit where you will see women having much longer careers,” Nightingale said. “But when you’re looking at veterans of wrestling for 20-plus years, you don’t come across that in other women very often.”
