MLJ: Sin Salida 2010 Part 4: Brazo de Plata, Rayo de Jalisco Jr., Strong Man vs Gigante Bernard, Máscara Año 2000, Universo 2000

Taped 2010-06-06
Brazo de Plata, Rayo de Jalisco Jr., Strong Man vs Gigante Bernard, Máscara Año 2000, Universo 2000

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdoazb_porky-rayo-strongman-vs-bernard-m20_latino


Sin Salida 2010 had been a pretty good show so far. Sure, the booking was a mess but the minis match was fun, and the two lower card matches with Los Invasores had the same sort of energy that their matches over the last month had and then the Revelos Increibles match was heated and effective.

Then we had this. It was definitely a nostalgia fest. Los Hermanos Dinomita and Rayo de Jalisco, Jr. were moving less smoothly than Porky in there at times. They had a few dives and I could have sworn the slow motion replay was on. Then to balance them you had Bernard and Strongman. I don't get how anyone thought this would be a good idea.

Rayo came out with a hat and a UWA title. Universo and Mascara Ano wore their masks to the ring. The rudos took an early advantage, mainly due to Bernard being such a force but their tandem offense wasn't exactly dynamite. There was a lackluster double lift snake eyes in the corner. Really, their best move for most of this match was to toss people into Albert's foot, after which point, he'd do his overhead X with thumbs down pose. It was kind of fun the first time but it got old.

Basically, the match had two things going for it. First, Bernard did well. He was doing little things like driving his forearm into Porky's face on a pin, and he did match up well with Strongman. By the time the comeback came around in the tercera he was playing into some of Porky's spots and selling and hamming it up big. The second thing was that Strongman is a pretty effective tool for rudos to run into. I was wondering how they were going to kill something like nine minutes for the tercera (the peril of watching match online is that you know how long is left in it at almost any point) and 2-3 minutes can be taken up by Strongman top wristlock strength spots and shoulder tackles or what not.

Another minute or two was taken up by Albert doing some really brutal armwork onto Strongman in order to take him out of the match. I could have watched another five or six minutes of that, really. It made me want to track down some more Bernard in Japan. Anyway, the whole point of it was to distract the refs with the carnage of him finding a foreign object to smash the arm (which he then failed to find?) so that Universo could hit a pile driver on Rayo.

In all the lucha matches I've seen over the last year, well over two or three hundred, I think this is the first time I actually saw a pile driver executed (and not, for instance, Rush's double underhook pile driver). For this. By Universo, on Rayo. The upside to this is that Universo and Rayo were sticking around for a bit at least. They even had a WWA title match main event at Puebla at the end of the month, so it's not like it was a total waste, but the fans, who were otherwise into this, didn't seem all that upset by it certainly.

Anyway, this was a match and I kind of wish it hadn't been.