MLJ: Guerreros del Infierno A-12: Rey Bucanero & Ultimo Guerrero (c) vs El Hijo Del Santo & Negro Casas [CMLL Tag]

2001-11-02 @ Arena Mexico
Rey Bucanero & Ultimo Guerrero (c) vs El Hijo Del Santo & Negro Casas [CMLL Tag]

I'm back to more familiar territory with GdI here. Thankfully, the next two matches on the disc are the title changes, so I have a pretty good sense of when they happened. I'm probably going to have to double back for a couple of Trios matches (including a title one) when I get back to things though. I've decided that I really need to hit something current before moving forward, so I'm going to take a week or two to look at Titan vs Barbaro Cavernario, with everything post-Busca last year. Negro Casas deep cuts will have to wait.

There are a couple of things that really stand out with this match. The first is that these four wrestlers really know each other well by now. Obviously the partners do, and work well together, but the pairings do as well. They've been around with things over the last year and that lets them weave a different level of complexity into their spots, especially the key ones that lead to transitions or finishes.

Case in point is the end of the primera. I didn't love the primera, by the way. It was fine, servicable, and Rey and UG had progressed to the point where they could keep up and where they could provide a sense of struggle. What they couldn't do, however, was bring anything above and beyond. They were at the point where Casas and Santo weren't going to move them around, but weren't really at the point where they could do masterful stuff. I'm not sure they ever got there either. My favorite Rey Bucanero stuff is when he's a dickish rudo and my favorite UG stuff has him blustering and powering through. Certainly the title matches between the two years later were lackluster.

Anyway, what I DID like was the finish of the fall. They ran through the pairings and Casas made a final comeback on UG and it looked like the tecnicos were going to take it. You can just get the feeling sometimes when you've seen enough wrestling. WWE is particularly bad about this. I imagine most people watching with any regularity can tell you what'll happen in most matches as its happening. Often that's a bad thing but a lot of the times it's because it's what should be happening within the genre. There's one "right" narrative and it's the path of least resistance. That's where this was heading. Casas was going to come back, hit La Casita, and the tecnicos were going to take the first fall. Instead, he got pushed off once, hit a clothesline, went for another low dropkick, and La Casita again. UG deadlifted him up into a powerbomb, though, and Santo, going for a camel clutch on Rey, got shoved off and locked into one of his own to give the rudos the first fall. Little twists on the norm make the world go round.

The segunda was what it was, a little bit of a beatdown, and then a pretty massive comeback. The comeback was good enough that I really wish there was more beatdown. It's possible something was cut but if so I didn't see it. GdI are best at beating guys down and doing their tricked out double teams. What separates this match from being pretty great and extremely great was the fact that they didn't have a couple more minutes to raise the tension before the tecnicos came back. I'm used to that with modern title matches, but usually, they're not set up for as much heat as this one was. Anyway, after a couple of minutes of them beating on Santo, Casas charges back in, they clear the ring, and then hit a couple of big dives. In a touching moment, after Santo took out both Rey and Casas (who was holding Rey), he helps his partner up and they both roll back in to win the fall, definitively, by countout.

Tercera was really good. Of course it was really good. What else would you expect here? There are a ton of great moments and near-falls, starting almost from the get go with Santo's Cavernaria on UG, through a few more dives, some really strong power offense by Ug, and a ton of partner saves. That's what made this work for me. Everything is sold since 90% of the kick outs come from partner saves. It felt somewhere in the middle of a finishing stretch between those big AJPW tags and the last year or so of Usos matches in the WWE, just with more focus and more heat.

The finish was great too, with UG pulled out of the ring at a key moment to let Santo hit his dive-through-the-ropes senton on Rey, taking him out of the match. One well-earned Casita later and the titles went to the tecnicos. Rey, especially was awesome at selling the loss as heartbreaking. Post match, they go so far as to shake each other's hands, and I'm a little surprised that no one threw money in. This was good, really good, with a hugely exciting tercera, but I thought the primera was lackluster due to what GdI could bring to the mat, and the segunda was way too short. If they just built up the heat a little more this could have been blow-away great.