Santana and Ortiz Reveal the Teams Outside of AEW They’d Like to Face

– TSN recently spoke to Inner Circle members Santana and Ortiz ahead of tonight’s Blood & Guts match on AEW Dynamite. Below are some highlights.

Ortiz on the team outside of AEW they’d most like to face: “For me, it’s plain and simple – [IMPACT’s] Motor City Machine Guns [Chris Sabin and Alex Shelley],” Ortiz said. I think about it all the time and I’m like ‘Damn, why did they come back when we left?’ We just missed them, but now with things being open, it’s very much a possibility and [IWGP Tag Team Champions] Guerrillas of Destiny [Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa], man. I’d love to wrestle them, too. They’re great. I love the intensity they bring. I think there would be something there.”

Santana’s choice on a team he’d like to work with: “Another team that we actually had the privilege to wrestle them back in Germany for the World Tag Team League with wXw [in 2017] and we’d love to do it again now with the experience we’ve gained since then is [Ring of Honor’s] the Briscoe Brothers. To us, they are tag team wrestling. We’ve said this in numerous interviews and we’ll say it again and have no issues saying it – they are the best tag team in the world. I don’t care what anybody says. Those dudes don’t take it easy. Mark and Jay are dudes who if they’re not going to go all-in in a match, then why bother? The fact that they’ve been going hard for so long, you have to respect it and we hope we get to mix it up with those dudes again.”

Ortiz on holding themselves to a high standard: “We just hold ourselves to a certain standard and we’re our own worst enemies. Like me and Santana go back and forth all the time and we just have a certain standard that we like to meet. There will be people all the time saying, ‘Oh, you guys did great’ [after a match], but Santana and I will be in the back and we’re just like ‘No, we can do better.’ We always have that in the back of our heads. We always feel like we can do better. That’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it keeps us not complacent. It doesn’t keep us in a comfortable place, which allows us to keep progressing. But at the same time, you have to understand there has to be a fine balance in between both those worlds. The pressure really is more from ourselves than it is from the company and the fans. But we’re not ignorant to that. We know that [pressure from them] exists, but I think we beat ourselves up more than anything else.”

Santana on how they thrive on pressure as a team: “There’s always pressure any time we step out from that tunnel and in front of cameras and the crowd but, thankfully for guys like us, we’ve thrived on pressure. We’ve embraced pressure our entire career because honestly it’s what allowed us to get better. It’s what’s allowed us to progress and it’s what’s allowed others to have confidence in us to make these things happen. We embrace that pressure. It’s going to be no different on Wednesday and it’s going to be no different going forward with everything that we do. And it’s not just pressure from fans or pressure from work or the company or anything like that, but we honestly put that pressure on ourselves. We thrive off of that and I feel like everybody should embrace pressure because pressure creates diamonds.”