MLJ: Rush vs Negro Casas 7: Diamante Azul, Marco Corleone, Rush vs Negro Casas, Ripper, Shocker

Aired 2014-05-11
taped 2014-04-28 @ Arena Puebla
Diamante Azul, Marco Corleone, Rush vs Negro Casas, Ripper, Shocker

In some ways this match was a breath of fresh air after the previous one with Niebla. There are obviously some similarities between a character such as Niebla and one such as Marco. Both of them have over the top theatrics and lean towards comedy, despite having pretty great punches. Marco rarely over-utilizes it to the detriment of the match, though, especially if they're in a more serious match. On the other hand, there's an element of repetition within a match with him that can sometimes take a viewer out of it. Ripper is a guy who's just there for me so far. I haven't seen a break out performance in 2014 but I also haven't seen him do anything egregiously bad. Azul is someone I don't have a great sense of yet either, but I was glad for the variation here. In some ways, it even felt like it was there more to set up a Ripper vs Diamante Azul match than anything else. Having Rush and Casas there as supporting players was sort of refreshing.

That said, there was definitely some structural wonkiness here. The flow matches where Rush teams with more traditional tecnicos is all over the place. Here, Rush, as usual, acted like a rudo almost completely, and Marco acted like Marco, including dialing on his abs and pretending to call someone at some point; he fits in fairly well with the Ingobernales act when necessary. Azul, however, was absolutely a straight up tecnico, down to hitting the old Atlantis "Let's give everyone a quebadora" spot, which is the most tecnico thing in the world to me, to set up the finish for the primera. Obviously they weren't in Arena Mexico which matters when it comes to Rush's reaction but it still felt weird.

Otherwise, the structure was fine though. They didn't even have the opening match beat down. Everyone got to make their entrances, with a short primera that still had some feeling out and matching up. It ended with the rudos dodging Air Italia so that Marco hit Azul by accident and they pinned both tecnicos at once. The segunda was mostly a rudo beatdown, though not enough of one to make any sort of comeback visceral. Casas and company spend so much time in a lot of these Rush matches on the defense, so it was nice to see them really get to play the rudos, though. The comeback was the Rush dropkick out of the corner again, the third time in four matches or something, but at least this was in front of a different crowd. It's still a knock against him for the year, I think. The tercera began with a reset, had some solid, if a bit deliberately paced Shocker and Marco sequence and comedy, some of the usual Rush dickishness (namely refusing to wrestle Casas and laying on the ramp instead) leading into the standard high quality Rush and Casas exchange with them brawling into the crowd and out of the match, and ended with Ripper pulling off Azul's match for the DQ, leading to calls for a mano a mano match and what not.

I like that we have matches such as these when CMLL hits places other than Arena Mexico. In this case, this was a match in a series between Ripper and Diamante Azul. The following week in Puebla, Azul would successfully defend his NWA Light Heavyweight title against Ripper. If you're going to have supporting players to help further your feud, Rush and Casas are about as good as you can hope for in 2014 CMLL. This felt somewhat slight as far as the Rush and Casas feud went but I bet it made the Azul vs Ripper feud feel all the more important. I kind of want to go back and see their title match now. Anyway, this was a fun deviation from the norm.