Commissions continue again, this one coming from frequent contributor YB. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
This was the annual Torneo Cibernetico match.
For the uninitiated or simply less initiated, this is an eight vs. eight tag team match with a set entry order or batting order to make it more easily understood, but since many of you are less American and/or big nerds, it means you can only tag out to the person next in line (or they have to come in next if, under lucha tag rules, you leave the ring). There are eliminations through the usual methods, and should one team have more than one man left at the very end, the will have to fight until one is left.
It can — in that it has in the past and will in the future — result in some of the better and more memorable CHIKARA matches ever, such as 2005’s one-hundred plus minute one (loved it at the time, plan on never ever watching it again so present me can never find what I’m sure are a thousand flaws), 2010’s all-time CHIKARA bullshit masterpiece of the CHIKARA team vs. the BDK which was one of the best of that year, and 2012’s similarly great CHIKARA vs. ROH edition.
That is not entirely the case here.
More often than not, these matches have some unifying story, if not tying together most of the major ones in the company. Usually team captains who are feuding and a month away from meeting in a blow-off match at the end of the season. It doesn’t always lead to the greatest combinations at the end or winners, CHIKARA being CHIKARA and all, but there’s usually a guiding concept and a focus behind everything.
Except in 2009, when — as CHIKARA seemed to do most of the year, likely sensing the chance afforded by the sudden change in Ring of Honor — the match became more about simply delivering a great match.
There were two major problems with this.
Firstly, a little less impactfully, was the choice to split eight tag teams up in a parejas increibles style, which is both a novelty that wears off after about half the match, and also something that doesn’t feel explored nearly enough (the two might be related). I’m not really sure how it would work with the batting order unless the got a little boring with it, at least at the start, but I think that might have solved some of the issues this had with repetition, if the company was always so inclined to make this edition of the match a lighter and faster fireworks-based display.
Secondly, and more obviously, it’s a little long and not everyone is all that great in it. There’s a longer Lince Dorado vs. Frightmare section in the middle that’s real real average where the match first begins to lose momentum, but in general, they go too fast from the start for a near fifty minute thing, eliminations or not. That first third or first half or so is a lot of fun, a million moving parts and them all mostly working crisply, but when nothing develops out of that and it never really escalates into a higher level fireworks show, combined with some more flubs and miscues coming later in the match, something gets lost. There’s a moment when the go to a mini dive train when the pace and intensity begins to mount, only to then go back to a lighter medium-grade back and forth, and it feels like it never totally finds its footing on such a high level again. The match, again in a CHIKARA Cibernetico, also misuses its assets, opting to showcase the Pinkie Sanchez in disguise fraud Carpenter Ant as its winner, and never quite becomes all it can be as a result of these choices.
Peak CHIKARA (07-11) being what it was though, something about it still works.
Between the pace, the gimmick always keeping things somewhat fresh, a line up this good (at the time), and a construction that at least keeps enough quality pieces around until the end even if a loser idea is the focal point, there’s something entertaining happening far more often than there isn’t. The combinations of guys like the original ants, Hallowicked, Quack, Jigsaw, the Bucks when they were just fun little flip dealers, the same for a masked Ricochet, etc., are all really good, and if underachieving, it’s a match that is almost always offering up good wrestling, and that very often drifts into great wrestling, as poorly organized as it all is.
Essentially, a fireworks show that never really builds and lacks the grand finale of the great ones, but that still offers up enough bright lights in enough interesting patterns to be worth my while.
The match isn’t perfect. Above all, it might be an example that in a match like this, you have to turn it up or go somewhere at some point. All the same, there are no major infuriating sins, it’s a forty to fifty minute long match that never becomes excruciatingly long, and there’s just too much breezy and good wrestling in it.
It’s just a little too much fun not to like.
HANDWERK 