Uprising: Lucha Libre Workrate Report 7/5/14

The last several weeks they've been showing reruns of this show, but now they're back to showing fairly recent stuff (which is a nice trend compared to them showing 4 year old matches). This match was from the 2/22/14 show in SF that we all attended. We ended up running a little late as Tim wildly took a turn like he was trying to shake a tail, a turn nobody suggested he take. It's possible Tim is leading a secret life and was trying to avoid running into his secret family or something. So we walked into this match right when the bell rang.

1. Cheerleader Melissa vs. Christina Von Eerie vs. Savanah Riley

Pretty disappointed when this was announced as a three way. Three ways are always a mess, lead to tons of awkward exchanges, tons of weirdly shoehorned three person spots, one person disappearing for way too much time, just bad. I much rather would have seen a singles match with any combo of the girls. I'm unfamiliar with Riley, but she worked the crowd better than the others, threw some nice forearms and chops, seemed fine. I've seen Von Eerie a lot more, and she is not very good. Really sloppy (she almost spikes herself delivering a sunset flip) and the "Oi" chants seemed a little lost on the audience made up mostly of hispanic children. Though I assume (if it hasn't happened already) that Colt Cabana will be using an Oy chant in a similar way Daniel Bryan does the Yes! kicks. This match had plenty of nice individual moments. Von Eerie took a nasty bump off the apron to the floor, letting Melissa/Riley work solo for awhile. Melissa bent Riley in half with a vicious indian deathlock/boston crab combo, and threw some cool axe kicks. The times the match fell apart were when they shoehorned  in 3-way spots, like the dreaded "superplex/powerbomb" which took a loooong time to set up for the payoff. Riley and Von Eerie kind of just had to freeze time, standing on the ropes waiting for Melissa to wedge herself into position to do the powerbomb, but Von Eerie is tiny so there really wasn't much space for Melissa to fit into. Just a predictable spot that rarely looks good, and really needs to be retired.  Brian Cage interferes on behalf of Riley, and Melissa takes him out with an awesome, out of control dive off the top, allowing Von Eerie to win the title back in the ring. Pro Wrestling Revolution always has a hilariously misguided and bad knack for making the good guys look bad in matches. Here they clearly wanted a big moment for Von Eerie, but they have her win the title by pinning the person who isn't the champ, while the actual champ (Melissa) dominated the whole match and was only out of the ring because guy twice her size interfered. Quite a special moment.

Later in the live card there was a match between Border Patrol member Derek Sanders, against clear tecnico El Mariachi. I mean, he was the obvious tecnico, coming out in full mariachi gear in front of a 85% hispanic crowd, doing a stylish zapateado with his intricately dressed valet, facing a guy who came out shouting about sending Mexicans back home. And all through the match you had El Mariachi yelling at his valet, complaining about interference to the ref, and then threatening to break up with his valet when he lost. The thing is, there WAS no interference, and he lost 100% clean to Sanders. So your big tecnico just whined the whole match and then blamed his loss on his chica, and the promotion genuinely thought he would leave to a polite ovation from the fans. I mean just a completely clueless way to book tecnicos.

Another major problem I was hoping the fed would fix on their TV hiatus, is the actual time management of their TV show. But my god it's as bad as ever. They have 30 minutes, and that's not a lot of time. But most weeks of television are one match stretched to fill the 30 minute run time. This three way was 11 minutes long, and it's the only match to get shown. We get 7 minutes of ring entrances, 11 minutes of match, and then 3 minutes of highlights of the match we just watched. Just a brutal and wasteful use of your 30 minutes. I know they don't have an extensive library, but their insistence on showing full ring entrances is maddening. This is time that can be much better spent showing some short features on your wrestlers, wrestler promos, promoting upcoming events, anything. But stretching an 11 minute match over the 30 paid for minutes is so, so foolish. It should not take 6 weeks to show one event's worth of matches, but I know they're going to milk this whole damn event, match by match. It's stunning how clueless this fed is when it comes to their TV.