MLJ: Guerreros del Infierno A-5: Rey Bucanero & Último Guerrero vs Mr. Niebla & Emilio Charles, Jr. [CMLL Tag]

2000-08-18 @ Arena México
Rey Bucanero & Último Guerrero © vs Emilio Charles Jr. & Mr. Niebla [CMLL TAG]

I'll probably do something else Monday to commemorate it, but as of then, I'll have done this for a year straight. Three a week, not missing any. We'll see if I make it through this week, of course. If anyone has a good idea what I should watch for Monday, let me know in the comments. Maybe I'll do the Hechicero vs Cavernario final. I obviously could have timed things better. Lucero vs Hechicero would have been ideal for it.

This match would have been pretty good too, but for completely different reasons. I had seen almost nothing a year and a half ago. I stumbled right into the deep end with the DVDVR 80s set (which is amazing. I can't talk that thing up enough. At some point I'm actually going to go back and finish it. At the time I got burnt out on the all trios disc 6 but my familiarity is way higher now, which I guess is the point). It's easy to get lost with lucha though, to lose the thread of a match if you're not careful, at least when you're new to it.
I think, in part, that's because people tell you the wrong things to look for. Everyone hears the same things when they want to get started in the genre: heels are rudos and faces are tecnicos, but it's not that cut and dry. There's a heel ref and a face ref. Guys can enter the ring when their partners leave the ring. Trios have a captain and either they can get pinned or the other two partners, etc. etc. That's not the important stuff, though, not really. No one ever tells you how trios matches are often there to set up a singles match, or how late match dives are there to clear the ring to allow for a focus on a pairing, or about the momentum shifts in the structure and how that's far more important than hot tags. At some point, I'm hoping to write more about this, but life is busy and I've got a match to talk about now. A match that's just clipped enough that I know I would have had a huge problem following it back in 2013. I think I've got the sense of it here though.

So, for those who missed the start of this series (I had a question before), I went and obtained a comp of Fredo's Best of Los Guerreros del Infierno that was made back in the middle of last decade, originally on VHS. Comps were a little different back then, so it's certainly not a huge retrospective. Instead, it's two discs, fifteen matches or so, covering 2000 to 2003 with some of their bigger tag matches. Since I'd rather review things that most of you can watch, I'm interspersing matches that are online when I can, but there aren't a ton. Those are the B matches in this. The comp matches are the A-matches. One of the reason I got the comp was because so many of the matches on it (and really from this era in general) just weren't online. I'll let you know if I can suggest the comp at the end, but so far with just the 2000 tag tournament it's been fun.

This was the big follow-up match to the tournament, where Charles (who had been injured and missed the last match of it) teamed back up with Niebla to get their shot. There's a vignette in an office with GdI arguing with the officials before this. It's a tricky match to cover because there's a ton of cutting, but it's still worth watching because it gives another example of the sort of action GdI brought to the table at this time. It's also a good look at super tecnico Niebla (with a blue and white mask, seconded by Atlantis) and grizzled tecnico Charles, both of which sort of feel unlikely with 2015 eyes.

What we see for the primera is the beginning and the finish. There's enough there to fill in the gaps. Niebla was pared with Bucanero (which meant Charles would have been paired with UG). They start out with some fairly competent matwork, including a fun little spot where Niebla does a standing leglock and Rey turns it into a small package. Niebla was a totally different wrestler back then. Casas or Atlantis are different than they were twenty years ago but a lot of the core is still the same. Niebla on the other hand is a totally different creature. Now he spits and pratfalls and gross-outs. There was a little, tiny bit of that here (more later) but mainly he bounced around the ring, incredibly agile. Given his personal issues, it's not surprising that he broke down more than most. The primera ended with a cute little sequence where Charles comes in, fiery, but gets double clotheslined. Then Niebla ends up monkey flipped in the middle of the ring, but sails head first into UG. That turned the tide so that Charles could hit a missile dropkick and a rana for one pin with Niebla doing is turn over tie-up for the other. It's hugely strange to see plucky tecnico Charles.

I'm sure we miss a chunk of the segunda here, but the general gist is this: the tecnicos take the fight to the floor. The rudos fight back and get the advantage and begin to double team huge to take the fall. The details are fun though, as we get to see some familiar moves from GdI, some new ones, and some slightly modified ones. For instance, Rey did this really nice twisting kick to set up the Senton de la Muerte in the corner. They did their run around pose thing after double dropkicking Charles out of the ring. It's still hard to get past how young UG seemed here with the theatrics. I do think there's a direct evolution to the GdA version of him and the Heavyweight champ that followed and the grizzled rudo leader we have now, but to see yesterday and today back to back, it'd be jarring. They won the fall with a tidal wave double splash, which was fairly impressive, and then a tight lift up-turn over double crab. I'm not a moves guy by any means, but, as I've said before, the lack of longstanding tag teams who actually get to defend their belts a lot in modern CMLL makes this sort of teamwork, especially when it's repeated between matches, really stand out.

The tercera felt disjointed and I'm not sure how much of that I can pin on the clipping. What we have here is all action, but I think that's what everyone got, certainly with a lot of tandem spots. The tecnicos went for double victory rolls and double ranas, for pins. We had a moment of double cradles with feet on the ropes by the rudos and then double quebadoras by the tecnicos, which they followed by mocking the GdI stomp around pose (but with Niebla putting his leg up like a dog relieving itself; see some of the modern Niebla was already there!). Things sort of fell apart from there. The tecnicos hit a superfly splash after an electric chair drop on UG but almost immediately thereafter, while the pin was happening, Rey locked in a crucifix pin and the timing was so off I wasn't sure what they were going for. The finish was Charles reversing a UG rana into a powerbomb, but UG somehow still rolling him up after the fact, while Rey hit a reverse figure four on Niebla. It's not until the match was over that we saw the replays of the dives we missed, all of them great, with Niebla doing this crazy assisted (by Charles' feet) moonsault up and over the top and UG with a no-hands flipping dive and Charles flipping off the apron. I think they had to have come between the pose-mock and the electric chair/splash.

You can get a real sense of the sort of big matches that GdI were putting on here, all full of huge spots, but maybe not the visceral sort of beatdowns that they'd manage a few years later. This was more about excitement and attitude. On a personal level, I consider the fact that I understand enough about lucha to have followed this, despite the clipping, to be a victory in and of itself. Like I said, I certainly wouldn't have been able to do that two years ago.