AJ Styles vs. Rey Mysterio vs. Ricochet vs. Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Robert Roode, WWE Raw (9/23/2019)

This was an elimination number one contenders match.

I’m not gonna tell you you have to see it.

You don’t, really.

What it is is thirteen or fourteen minutes of cool moves, that’s constructed incredibly well and led by two of the best wrestlers of all time in Rey Mysterio and AJ Styles. It’s not going to make a single list, except maybe like best WWE TV matches in this specific September, maybe. It is, however, less talked about — both overall and in hyper-niche circles full of people who know about deeper WWE TV cuts — and a match that impressed me more than a lot of the other big multi-man WWE matches this year (primarily those prestige ass gauntlet attempts that are never ever able to recapture the 2013 Bryan magic) and a bunch of other stuff that I watched and either was not moved in the slightest by or found too boring to write about in what is, essentially, just combing for anything this year I didn’t get to initially.

Basically, I liked it more than I expected to, and since I had never heard about it, I thought someone out there might too.

AJ Styles and/or Rey Mysterio is almost constantly in the ring holding the hands of everyone else in there, and the match is relatively short enough for how many people are involved that the less skilled or currently skilled guys like Nakamura, Ricochet, and Roode really only have to do a few things here or there. Ricochet only has to the big sensational things, Roode has to do a few things and be a base/foil for Rey in the last ninety seconds, and Nakamura really only has to hit a few knee strikes. Everything else is either offense from one of the greatest offensive wrestlers ever, a bump from one of them, or something set up between the two of them (and while again limited, AJ and Mysterio seem more and more comfortable together every time).

Mysterio beats Bob Roo with the 619 and Frog Splash.

Really good and borderline great television bullshit, light and breezy and full of cool stuff but exactly short enough to not ask anything too overzealous, anchored and built around two of the best television wrestlers of the century so far. Inessential, but another reminder of just how easy it all can be.

three boy

Blue Demon Jr. vs. Dr. Wagner Jr., AAA Triplemania XXVII (8/3/2019)

This was a Mask vs. Hair Match.

Yeah alright, fucking whatever, it’s not perfect.

It’s a little simple relative to maybe all it could have been based on the raw material that the match works with (blood, drama, bullshit), and while it’s not like going fifteen minutes is inherently good or bad, it feels like there’s a not insignificant amount left on the table. Individually, Blue Demon Jr. is not and (to the best of my knowledge) has not ever been an especially good wrestler let alone a great one, and that doesn’t exactly change here, delivering a performance that I would say meets the moment rather than being one that creates it. It is also just AAA as hell. Referee nonsense that, weirdly, seems to go both ways, combined with interference, horrible horrible commentary if you watch it in English, all the weird little things on the edges that have a way of gnawing at a thing. It’s the sort of match that is slightly confusing in a lot of small ways, so much so that had I saw it when it happened and before I had really started to explore lucha more through this blog, I would have put down to differences I just didn’t really get, but now having a better handle on all of that, it’s just sort of weird in ways that are always minorly annoying.

Very little of that matters.

Almost none of it does, in a larger sense. There are reason this isn’t an even better match, sure. These things are not reasons it’s bad, so much as they’re the reasons it’s not one of the best matches of all time or like top twenty five of the decade, because with the strengths this match has, it very easily could have been.

For everything else, the remarkable unevenness of it all, it’s also a match that does two of my favorite things a wrestling match can do.

One is that, while maybe not as nerdbaity and conventional as many other such instances, this is a grade-A WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS BLOG? classic.

Blue Demon Jr. and Dr. Wagner Jr. do not explicitly have a hand match, so much as that it kind of extends out from a larger theme and is a convenient thing for them to grab onto to fill some space, but when Demon Jr. is beating up our guy with a hammer, he decides to also throw a shot to the hand for good measure. And I mean, look, there’s just no way I’m not going to love a match where someone gets hit in the hand with a hammer, you know? Doubly so when it matters for the rest of the match like it does here. Wagner Jr. either legitimately broke his finger or is incredible at always holding his ring finger specifically in a fucked up way so that it looks like that (I don’t want to know which one it was, wrestling is cooler when I don’t know), and spends the rest of the match unable to use both hands. Demon Jr. also repeatedly goes to a more hand/wrist focused Fujiwara Armbar for a majority of the last half of the match, and so in both ways something like this can matter after the fact, it does.

It’s not only something incredibly sick, but with real value too, the best of both worlds.

That sort of dovetails into the other thing, because holy shit, this is a violent match.

Wagner and Demon aren’t hurling light tubes at each other or carving each other with spikes, but between the hammer, a champagne bottle to the face, and a genuinely alarming amount of blood, it’s so much more than enough. Between the gruesome sights captured perfectly by maybe the best camera work (on an overall shot-by-shot angle within one specific match) in wrestling all year and the importance that feels baked into every single movement made in the match, one wrestled with a goal ultimately of doing one of the most spiritually harmful things possible to the other, the feeling of violence is always here. And this being professional wrestling, the feeling is the most important part.

One hand washes the other, the blood loss and the tight construction helps create that feeling just as much as the way Wagner Jr. and Demon Jr. carry themselves, but it’s those feelings both of violence and chaos as well as that feeling of great significance that propels the match forward, and push it past everything else. The weird bullshit, some of the pacing, bad interference near the end, all of it sort of goes away when you see these guys both covered from head to toe in blood, wailing on each other and grabbing onto anything they can.

The match becomes the image, and there aren’t too many better images than these.

Blue Demon Jr. breaks a chunk of concrete on Wagner Jr’s head for the win he was probably always going to get.

It’s not perfect, real far from it, and I don’t place it quite on the level that many of its more fervent supporters do, but if you were ever like me and put it off or maybe found it too unbelievable to consider, you maybe ought to go for it. If you watch wrestling for the right reasons and don’t get hung up on the smaller things, there’s so much to love here.

When you get the big stuff as right as this does, very little else matters.

***1/2

Undisputed Era (Roderick Strong/Kyle O’Reilly) vs. Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch, WWE NXT (6/12/2019)

The television sprint version of one of the previous year’s best matches.

It works for all the same reasons, mechanically speaking.

Two of the best wrestlers in the entire world in Rodddy and Oney have ten minutes to unload, and the match smartly orients itself around them, both against each other and as the anchors of their teams. Kyle is again at his best with the Rod Dog setting the pace and direction, and with a guy like Lorcan to bounce off of. Oney is a ball of energy unlike anything else in the company, basically starting the match on a de-facto hot tag run, while also delivering in the back half too, on top of adding in a great in-peril performance in the middle. Roddy and Kyle don’t have the resume this year that they in in the previous one, but their control work is as great as always. Mean and crisp and cool and perfectly assembled.

Danny Burch is also here and, objectively, is fine. Cursed to be a good wrestler in the ring with three great ones, not an active detriment, but clearly the odd man out.

Like their last match though, again, the match is better off for kind of leaning into this, and works in the same way narratively speaking.

Oney Lorcan is now even better than he was then. Narratively, you can chalk it up to time on his own on 205 Live and facing and beating a higher caliber of wrestler than he had in the WWE up to this point. He starts hotter than ever here, is more successful individually against both Strong and Kyle than he was a year ago, but he still has to carry more than 50% of the share, and suffers for it.

There’s a great bit in the first half where it feels like the protagonists set up for a double dive spot, only for Oney to hit a flip dive onto both of them by himself, and basically, that’s the match. Roddy and Kyle also  take over when Danny is unable to hit the same corner attack on Roddy that Oney hits on Kyle on the other side, creating the exact amount of space needed for Roddy to get Oney in a two on one. Even when Burch has the tag at the end, Roddy and Kyle are always able to take advantage of these moments where he recovers slower than Oney by a second or two. Even if the match never sees them clearly have the match won, based on the similarity to a match that they won a year prior, it seem to be treading that way, even if Burch does a little better for himself in the back half.

Unfortunately, it is the WWE, and what seems both in the match and on paper like it’s leading to a genuinely cool development — either Oney’s improvement or Burch stepping up for once pushing them to finally achieving the upset a year later — instead takes a backseat to the push of a cryptofascist ass Blue Lives stable, when the Forgotten Sons cause a distraction that lets Burch roll up Kyle to win.

Frustrating, but accidentally, a perfect look at NXT at the time.

At the end of not only a great match, but a rematch of a Takeover Classic that manages to be both great in a different way while quietly advancing a story dormant for a year, complete with stellar performances from some of the all-world talents stuck down here long past the point that they should have been, the match never gets to reach its true and proper climax, instead turning into a showcase for an act not only filled up with real boring people in and out of the ring, but that also wasn’t over in the slightest and never once in years and years of effort, made any progress on that front. Something that worked, despite no real effort put in in a larger sense, undercut for something almost as offensive as it was boring.

NXT started the war a few months after this, but a segment like this shows exactly what it was that they wound up losing it.

Not the match it was a year earlier in a much higher profile spot and for a brand that was much hotter than it was at this point, but great enough to count, on top of the lovely little snapshot of the promotion exactly as it was at the start of its great decline.

***

El Barbaro Cavernario vs. Templario, CMLL Super Viernes (6/7/2019)

This was a lightning match.

It rocked.

For more regular readers, you know the deal here. Bare with me here, I’m gonna talk to the other side of the room for a little bit.

Lightning matches — or matches with one fall or a ten minute time limit in modern CMLL — are sort of a tricky thing. By definition, there is not a lot of time there, typically used to preview future match ups or in some cases simply to change things up on a show otherwise full of three fall matches, and so wrestlers tend to just stuff everything in there. It’s usually more about the moment, these brief shows of lights and sounds, than anything broader in a narrative sense, a short burst of spectacle. When they work, they’re either the result of (a) two old hands going in there and knowing the exact right mixture a match needs to be worthwhile and it just so happening to turn out great, or (b) two guys with a lot of really extraordinary offense to hurl about for close to ten minutes, or ten minutes exactly.

Barbaro Cavernario and Templario are the latter.

Pretty much every moment of the 9:45 or so that this match lasts before a result is spent on real cool stuff, one bad fighting spirit dueling poison rana sequence aside. Four really spectacular dives, two a piece, each different from the other. Sick offense back in the ring, again with every piece of it managing to stand apart from the others and also always feeling like the actions taken by people trying to win a match as quickly as possible.

Templario and Cav do the thing that all the great short matches do, not just the lightning ones, and that’s offer a reminder that — so long as they have a green light and nothing in their way like clipping out half of an eight minute match for a commercial break — time really isn’t that much of an excuse. They have a better one in them at fifteen or twenty minutes, to be sure, but it’s a tremendous display of bright flashes and loud bangs all the same, gained simply by letting great wrestlers loose for long enough to count.

It never has to be that hard.

three boy

 

Virus vs. Metalico, CMLL Juicio Final 2019 (5/31/2019)

This was a Career vs. Career match.

For those uninitiated, maybe those to never read the praise of some of my peers for this match, you may be asking who exactly Metalico is.

Metalico is a longtime CMLL midcarder, who never really did much higher up the card. The mid to late 90s through 2009 are sort of a blind spot for me as far as lucha goes, but even through the last decade, I would struggle to name a single time I’ve seen him. He is not especially distinctive in his looks outside of a pencil thin mustache. His physique is not great, a classic middle aged sort of guy, his gear is ordinary, and while this match clearly shows that he’s real far from being a bum, he is not the sort of guy you might call an overwhelming talent. In a match not explicitly about him, he would not stand out.

This is usually where I would say “none of that matters”, but that’s not the case here.

It does matter.

All of it matters, because that’s what makes this match.

People have argued — and will continue to argue forever — about what the most important aspect of wrestling is. It’s sort of a hard thing to do, because really, it’s all connected. A truly great match is rarely great just because of force of narrative or pure mechanics alone, there’s a cooperation between the two more often than not, but the difference between matches I like and matches I love comes down to pure feeling, and this match has so much of it.

So few matches tend to get there for me that I often spend time here talking about the more quantifiable aspects of a match, focusing on quality mechanics or great performance quirks, but this is a match not only wrestled with real feeling, but that really really got me. Not everybody is going to be hit in the same way by the same stuff, one of my favorite matches of the decade has that status because it is an old man bowing out that happened within the same month that my father passed away, and I would never expect anyone else to love it like I do a a result. This isn’t quite that, but likewise, I cannot expect everyone to see what I saw in it, to like it like I did, or to latch on in the same way.

Hearts and minds are curious things, and what holds true for mine may not hold quite as true for yours, and all of that.

The thing is, show me “underappreciated reliable workhorse makes good”, and I am completely in. I love that stuff. Catnip. Dirtbags achieving things, unassuming guys doing their best under an uncommonly large spotlight, I adore it. Couple it with a major apuestas (lack of hair on the line or not, this is still a wager), the feeling of said guy also fighting for his livelihood, and I am completely hooked.

All this match really has to do is to live up to that, and it does so much more.

Metalico, individually, is fantastic.

The desperation pouring out of him at every second is so great, and feels so real. He seems like someone on edge for the entirety of the match, doing his best but weirdly, also like someone who knows he is up against it and prepared for something to go wrong. Beyond the way he carries himself, his actions in the match also do a lot to further the idea, both on purpose and not. Part of that is the gigantic stuff he breaks out nearly from the start, like the missile dropkick off the apron that’s one of my favorite moves in wrestling, only ever used by the most under-the-gun psychos in wrestling. The way the match has him (and Virus too, to be fair) both get dirtier and more frantic as the match goes on — going from fairly clean wrestling to covering each other’s eyes in holds or going low or throwing in cheap punches in the back half — is also perfect, not only for an apuestas in general, but for one with these stakes. The dying of the light and things of that nature. There are also less obviously planned things that add a whole lot, like how Metalico’s first tope is gorgeous and impactful and hits perfectly, but his second one near the end barely goes through and sees him just hit Virus with a headbutt to the face, almost coming up short.

Virus is Virus.

There’s not as much with him because, at least to me, he is much more of a known quantity. He does things he always does well. Smooth movements, beautiful base work, stellar reactions to everything, all of that. He is the control group in this match, the baseline that makes the other stuff stand out, the foundation on which to build, but he is as great at that as always.

Where the match really succeeds, of course, is the gut punch that hits about midway through (I am an optimist) that for Metalico, it is never going to be enough. With his nerves on edge and spending twenty minutes walking on the edge of a knife, even throwing out the biggest stuff he can think of, he is not only less practiced in matches of this caliber than Virus is, but he is also just less skilled. He can unload with a flurry of hands, but Virus can drop him with one right. He can do all of the most sensational stuff in the world, but he lacks the real high end offense that Virus has. He’s never a sitting duck, he meets his end standing and fighting it every step of the way, even creating that ultra impressive and powerful well MAYBE when he kicks out of a few big pieces of offense like the near Kudo Driver of Virus, but it is never in doubt.

Virus makes Metalico submit to a near Scorpion Cross Lock, and Metalico retires, as he was always going to.

The joy of this match is not in the result, but in the process, and in the performance. A career midcarder, maybe an underachiever standing up in the last ever chance to do so not only putting on a show but being so appreciated in those final moments for it. Someone closer to normal, closer to the rest of us than so many of the big heroes in wrestling, wrestling outside of himself for one night and standing up to achieve something special, even in defeat. Fighting against the inevitable, because what else is there to do? It’s beautiful stuff, once again proving that the best wrestling matches are more than just matches.

A genuine triumph, taking a charming little premise and going as far as possible with it to create something genuinely moving, resulting in not only one of the most memorable matches of the year, but one of the very best as well.

***1/2

Mistico II vs. El Barbaro Cavernario, CMLL Super Viernes (5/24/2019)

This is one of those matches.

You know the kind.

A lot of times, you can look at something on paper and maybe not discount it (this is not another “they don’t wrestle matches on paper” motif review, fucking relax), but not expect it to be quite as great as it is. The fake Mistico, aka Dralistico, is not a bad wrestler so much as a seemingly average one who I expect nothing from. El Barbaro Cavernario, being one of my favorite wrestlers of the last decade, is someone who I will watch almost all available work of, and who has done a lot with lesser wrestlers than Dralistico, but even then, I didn’t quite expect this.

For whatever reason, probably that undefinable magic that occasionally finds its way into a wrestling ring at unpredictable moments, something just clicked here. 

This works in the way a lot of the really great Cavernario three fall matches do.

Not just in terms of the CMLL structure, but Barb himself has a real great formula that seems to get as much as he can given what he has to work with. The first fall goes to him, the second either comes off a flash roll up pin for the other guy or a mask removal DQ, and then the third is your big finishing run. It’s the ideal way to do this, for me, especially because of the second fall, a the babyface of the match goes into the third having yet to actually beat Barb, creating a higher level of drama that always serves the match better and gives them a real sense of accomplishment when he loses. It works out especially well in this match, as instead of his splash off the ropes for the first fall, Cav instead ties Mistico II up in a complex pinfall to get that fall, meaning that when the bombs begin to fly in the third, there’s no repetition. Further more, because of how the three fall matches tend to work in modern CMLL (kick out of moves that won earlier falls to enable a feeling of escalation and progression), this choice has the added benefit of meaning no big move in the third ever has the feeling of being an obvious nearfall, as some of these can occasionally feel like once you know the formula.

Beyond that, the performances are really good, and being the main event, they have a green light to get pretty crazy with it.

Cavernario is as he almost always is in a big singles match with a clear runway. He’s a total maniac of a bad guy, ripping the mask like he means it and constantly gesticulating and taunting and posing. The volume turned up as loud as possible at all time, but always feeling genuine at the same time, and not like someone performing, which is a tremendous feat given that he is The Cave Barbarian in the twenty-first century. He’s also a certified bump freak who also has some of the best offense in wrestling when it’s his turn at bat.

On the other end, Mistico II turns in the best performance I’ve ever seen him have. He only does a lot of really extraordinary stuff but does it in a way that is both smooth and impactful. Not only physically impactful, but dramatic as well. It’s not super rare, but it’s also not super common for a dive to have an extra level of emphasis, managing to feel just as much like a “fuck you” as it is a spectacular bit of artillery, and the flip dive that begins his comeback in the third fall manages to have that feeling.

Mostly, the match is just so so well assembled in the final third or final half. It’s not just that they do a bunch of cool things, but they’re all put in what feels like the exact right order and place in the match. There’s an especially spectacular string of things on the floor near the end, with Barb taking a rana bump off the apron, a gorgeous Mistico II leap off the ramp onto the top buckle and then into a flip dive, and then something else leading to the classic Cavernario splash off the top to the floor. They keep the same spirit back inside, with everything always escalating as well and as sensibly as posible, also always keeping that sense of urgency alongside the immaculate craftsmanship.

Unsurprisingly, as this is a Cavernario singles, Mistico II gets the win with the his move.

Not an overwhelmingly large surprise or something coming entirely from out o nowhere, as I believe Barb capable of all things, but still a surprise, and a very welcome one.

***1/4

AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe vs. Rey Mysterio, WWE Raw (4/22/2019)

This was part of some contender’s tournament, whatever.

Yeah, it sucks that it was on WWE TV, so like fifteen plus is clipped down to ten and it’s also not as big and/or as wild as all three of these guys, even in older age, are still capable of getting. All of that, the usual caveats that always need to be said before praising something like this because I’m mentally ill and always imagine a person in my head when writing who I’m arguing against. Right. Everyone knows the scenario is not ideal, whatever, shut up, that’s what makes it impressive in the first place.

A decade and a half, and then some, since they first began wrestling each other in multi-man matches, and eight months removed from having one of the best matches of the previous year, AJ Styles and Samoa Joe have yet another great match together. Switch out a rotating third man between them over the years to include one of the twenty or so greatest professional wrestlers of all time, and shocker, it is a delight.

Rey fits in perfectly with the things AJ and Joe want to do in these matches, and arguably tops them on the insanity scale. AJ and Joe are AJ and Joe, nobody is shying away from the damage here, but Rey’s the one with both the big bump outside (the standard penguin slide) and the dive of the match, along with all the horrific things Joe does to him. The most heartwarming part of the match also includes Rey, where he and Styles break out an old AJ Styles vs. Amazing Red bit with AJ using the rare and beautiful snap rana bump that usually only ever got broken out for Red and Matt Sydal.

The match, as stated earlier, does not offer up everything it could. It’s only a teaser for what a Rey Mysterio vs. AJ Styles match might look like. It also continues to deny the world a real prolonged Joe vs. Mysterio section, continuing a very nasty habit out of the WWE around this time of continually throwing them at each other but rarely seeing it through properly.

However, given that we do eventually get a few samples of what AJ Styles vs. Rey Mysterio does look like, and given that what this match does have to offer — a ten minute buffet of cool offense in a tight package — it’s a lot too hard to stay upset about things like that.

A little curiosity more than anything anyone has to see, but speaking as someone who sees these names together and simply has to know what it looks like, it’s real far from being an unsatisfying one.

***

Dominic Garrini vs. Joshua Bishop, AIW Slumber Party Massacre (4/4/2019)

This was a Submit or Surrender match, so basically I Quit.

It fucking rocks.

Just whips tons upon tons of ass, man. It’s just such a cool god damned match.

One of the most fun things to see happen in wrestling — and predominantly it happens in independent wrestling, both because of the freedom, the settings where atmosphere can easily develop and impact a match, and also that it’s full of younger wrestlers starting to pull it together — is when for no clear or obviously discernable reason, something just comes together.

This match, at the time and maybe a little in retrospect too, this had no real obvious reason to work as well as it did.

Dominic Garrini, while steadily improving for years, had yet to really break out like he would for the rest of the year. Hell, this is the match that made the idea of Deathmatch Dom a thing to begin with, an idea then later cemented by a string of great brawls later in the year. Joshua Bishop is not a guy I’ve ever really loved and who I cannot recall having a match that I liked as much as this either before or since. The math or science or whatever you put on paper to figure out probable outcomes does not look entirely in the favor of this match .

Again though, math is bullshit, this is as much art as it is science, and sometimes these things just happen.

So, as it happened, some sort of spirit came into the ring and possessed the two of them. Dominic Garrini reveals a true talent for bleeding and for fighting and for creating a sense of danger and chaos in matches like these. Joshua Bishop is put in the perfect environment to be an absolute freak. They have a bunch of incredibly sick and awesome and grotesque ideas, specifically involving Garrini’s cauliflowered ear getting stabbed with stuff. Additionally, the match benefits immensely from a relatively short eleven minute runtime, and mostly, its place early in the show in front of a real hot WrestleMania Weekend crowd.

Everything that could go right here goes even more correctly than one could ever reasonably expect.

The fill the thing up with jaw-dropping stuff from beginning to end, like Dom taking a horrific powerbomb through some chairs off the stage, nasty skewer and thumbtack spots, real wild shots, and an endearingly cavalier dive early on.

Even the finish — a non-impact type of finish where instead of a big gross thing to cap off the festival of violence, Dom is handcuffed to the corner, doused in lighter fluid, and threatened with immolation until surrendering — works out pretty well. It’s never my favorite way for one of these matches to end, the threat of something actually happening rather than the pain of something currently happening, but if it’s gonna be that, you really have to go as far as this match did. Don’t half ass it, if an I Quit match is ending with the threat of something, it should be something as insane as almost being set on fire and murdered.

Really, that’s the trick here. The dial is turned past ten on every single thing that happens in the match, on every idea they had, and on the environment itself, pushing past what the clear limitations might be in a normal match in front of a more normal crowd. The result of everything that works here, by design and through the magic nobody can ever plan for, is in my eyes, your annual Mania Weekend sleeper.

One of the most fun and memorable matches not only of the weekend, but of the entire year.

***1/4

Demus vs. Gato de Ecatepec, Lucha Memes Chairo Kingdom (3/31/2019)

This was a Hair vs. Mask match.

Is it good?

You know, not really.

The three fall structure is not really as much the domain of our man Demus in the way that a one fall brawl is. Mostly though, it is down to the opponent here, and that’s where the match becomes something else entirely.

Gato de Ecatepec is a fascinating wrestler to watch, in all of the least flattering way. He seems constantly uncomfortable moving around, he turns to run the ropes more obviously and a few steps earlier than all but the greenest behind the ears U.S. indie or Performance Center rookies I’ve ever seen, as if he has just learned how. He is also so short — the first wrestler I’ve seen Demus be able to look over — and so skinny that my initial thought was that he was a child. Some fifteen year old related to someone, maybe engaging in money mark behavior (for what reasons I don’t know, but wrestling is fucking weird, all things are possible), whatever. It feels like some sitcom plot or reality show premise, throwing some skinny inexperienced nothing in a match and taping it so you can use 2:00 of it on another program, but (a) that is not really the realm of a place like Lucha Memes (compliment), & (b) that is not what happened at all.

I was curious enough to do the research, as he also had no Cagematch nor LuchaDB profile, and according to Luchawiki, Gato de Ecatepec has been wrestling since 2002, with that being the only available information. In a moment, realizing this is the work of a wrestler with supposedly seventeen years worth of experience, he turns from a curiosity to being the subject of the rare thought and question, “is this the single worst wrestler I’ve ever seen?”.

So, while not great and barely even good — all of that due to the bleeding and overall activity of Our Hero on the other end of the thing – it’s also impossible to look away from. Not because it ever really gets messy, but because it’s so unbelievably engrossing to see one of the best wrestlers in the world have the skeleton of what really may have been a great apuestas match — the blood, his individual offense, the escalation of the three fall structure to build drama — if not for being the other half of one of the bigger talent mismatches I can recall seeing in some time.

A fascinating document.

 

Virus vs. Flamita, Lucha Memes Chairo Kingdom (3/31/2019)

God yes.

It is not, like, the fifteen to twenty minute title match style classic that they maybe could have had in a better world half a decade earlier. It is not even fifteen minutes in the year in which it happens. It’s a ten minute relative sprint in the middle of a Lucha Memes show, which is not exactly the number one priority of either Virus or Flamita at this specific moment in time.

Having said all of that, whatever, it’s still a blast.

Virus predictably gels super well with a fluid high flier who has a lot of neat offense to break out, Flamita predictably gels super well with one of the best bases there is who can also adapt to his more action-oriented style, and the effort is there too. Nine or ten minutes in the hands of lesser wrestlers is an excuse, and in the hands of Virus and Flamita, it is not. They pack the match not only with a ton of really cool things, but also assemble a real tight thing on its own. Teases and payoffs, proper escalation, the idea of Virus trying and failing to contain Flamita and having to throw out some rarer and more impactful offense to keep up, it’s spectacular and sensible all at once.

The boys, unsurprisingly, pull it together and deliver a match worthy of the anticipation.

Virus wins with a real sick Kudo Driver.

If your eyes light up at seeing “Virus vs. Flamita” up there in the lights (in this case, the lights mean the title of this post on whatever service you use to initially view the drops), then no matter what this isn’t, it’s still probably going to do at least something for you. Not the greatest in the world or the ideal version of the thing, but what it is is too good and too fun and too nice to see out there in the actual world to deny.

Some of the easiest math around results in a predictably great match.

***