Segunda Caida Gets an Incomplete: The Wrestling What I Watched in 2007 Pt. 6, by S.L.L.

Well, if there's one experience that I have intimate familiarity with from my brief college career, it's getting an incomplete. To add insult to injury, the first paragraph of this actually has the phrase, "an SLL promise is a promise for life", although I'm posting it now, so I guess I kinda fulfilled that promise, albeit in a half-assed way.

OK, note to self, don't wait seventy years after watching a wrestling match to review it. That goes double if those matches are lousy. Well, some of the matches on the first disc of the esteemed Goodhelmet's Best of 2007 set stink. Some are legitimately awesome. In either case, I promised I'd review them, and an SLL promise is a promise for life, whether I like it or not.

By the way, in keeping with my original plans for this series, I'm only reviewing the matches I hadn't seen yet before getting this. If you must know, Briscoes vs. Marvin/Suzuki didn't do it for me, Hardys vs. MNM and Cena vs. Umaga were obviously awesome, and I already reviewed Joe vs. Morishima earlier in this series.

Takashi Sasaki, Abdullah Kobayashi, Shadow WX, & MASADA vs. MEN'S Teioh, Jun Kasai, Jaki Numazawa, & Yuko Miyamoto
BJPW - 1/2/2007 - Tokyo, Japan
Fluorescent Light Tubes Death Match

Oh God, this was painful. And not in the good "hot damn, Onita's dragging his back along barbed wire" kind of painful you want from death matches. This was more of the "hot damn, Zandig doesn't even know what a wrestling match is, does he?" kind of painful. Well, maybe not that bad, but still. I'd say something like "you know you're in trouble when MASADA is clearly the worker of the match" but....

1. I haven't seen a MASADA match since before he was in The Carnage Crew.
2. He was actually legit good here. In the midst of guys standing around to set up needlessly complex spots, odd patches of no-selling, and Abdullah Kobayashi throwing the shittiest strikes imaginable, MASADA actually comes off as a guy you want to see more of. Comes off as the guy you would actually need to be afraid of in a death match. He gets a lot of neat spots, including grabbing Miyamoto by the legs and dragging as back around on all the broken glass, and punching the seat out of a chair before using it as a weapon. I've written elsewhere about how the Finlay/JBL match from Mania was conceptually cool because they took the late-90's/early-00's "cookie sheets and garbage can lids" style of benign, mainstream hardcore wrestling, and made it look really hard and dangerous. Getting hit with just the seat of a crappy folding chair is about the same as getting hit with a garbage can lid (and the way Miyamoto no-sells it hammers that home) but the way MASADA sets it up by just punching the seat out of the chair makes it look like he's doing some seriously bad stuff. So there's MASADA's name next to the names of Finlay and JBL, for whatever that's worth.

Anyway, the rest of the match is pretty much ass. The post match with Miyamoto getting all up in Sasaki's mug and Sasaki beating the shit out of him, but Miyamoto refusing to back off, was kinda neat. Got me interested in their match later in the set. I didn't need to sit through Abdullah Kobayashi throwing punches that would make Rob Van Dam shake his head in disgust to get there, though.

Mistico vs. Averno
CMLL - 1/5/2007 - Mexico City, Mexico

This is match #1,998,246,767 in their Best of 4,000,000,001 Series, which Mistico is winning handily. If ever seen these two wrestle each other before, this exactly like that. Averno is really good, Mistico has some nice spots but can't put a match together, and he's also got that stupid "Asai moonsault to a downed opponent who gets their feet up to block it" spot, which is basically the flashiest, most high-risk version of the "top rope axehandle to a downed opponent who gets their foot up to block it" spot ever. That is all.