MLJ: 2015 Volador, Jr! Wrestler of the Year? Still Sort of Crummy? 1: Volador Jr. vs Rey Bucanero

Aired: 2015-01-10
Taped: 2015-01-06 @ Arena México
Volador Jr. vs Rey Bucanero

Volador's been getting a lot of hype this year. A lot. People are bandying around the idea of "Wrestler of the Year" and I am hugely dubious. I'm not going to go out and say he's the babyface Miz of CMLL, because that might be going a bit too far, but he is not a wrestler I like much. He's technically proficient, in that he can hit his stuff quickly and well, but there's never much purpose or meaning behind it. He's a guy who tends to get a lot in, to have action-packed matches where the moves are competent and well-executed, but matches that lack soul. Lucha is about the anticipation, the build up and the payoff, and he's terrible at portraying the emotion behind what he's doing. He's okay at taking a beating but not okay at making that beating matter in the grand scheme of a match.

But, people have been high on him this year and maybe there's something to that. Sometimes things just click. Maybe they have here. I'm going to watch some things, selected. I'm not going to watch everything in 2015, only things that interest me, and I'll tap out when I decided I had enough of him. This was a good place to start since it was so early into the year and a singles match.

He started the year teaming with Maximo against Rey Bucanero and Terrible. Rey was coming off of a sort of inexplicable cage match hair win over Felino so it made sense that he was going to drop a hair match of his own, and he did in March, so there's a decent amount of this pairing for the first few months of the year. Rey's a sentimental favorite of mine, even if I think he's fairly flawed as a luchador. I probably like him more in 2015, older and broken down, than I do in the 2001-2002 matches I'd been watching. He's more seasoned now and tends to get the point behind things better. It's just that if you put him against the wrong opponent, you get a match like this. Regardless, he had Bullet club pants and Sting's facepaint and Zacarias in an awesome turban thing, so those were all pluses, I suppose.

The match itself was of a certain sort. Rey ambushed Volador on the way out. The next few minutes were a beatdown with Volador getting a blip 'rana pin to end a short primera but not actually gaining the advantage and Rey undoing the turnbuckle and slamming Volador's head into it, distracting Tirantes long enough for him to hit a pile-driver to end a short segunda. It's modern CMLL stuff but a bit more heated and meaningful than usual. The pile-driver actually had the crowd sort of pissed, for instance, and they could have built the start of the tercera into something worthwhile. Volador could have really come back and instilled some emotion into the match.

Of course, that's not what they did. Rey pretty lamely put his head down, ate a kick, and the first of far too many superkicks in the match, and they pulled a reset. Volador followed it with a few dives, which in and of itself, would be ok. I've seen matches where the tecnico uses the dives to turn the tide. They just seemed to be there for show here. There wasn't really any selling. Rey was right back in the ring hitting moves. That'd be the story of the rest of the match. They didn't really sell anything, not even in that "you hit a move and then we both lay down for a while" sort of way. They just rushed on to the next spot.

Some of he spots were good. I liked Rey's multiple reverse headlock backbreaker/flipped facebuster thing. Volador hit his backcracker. There was a nice but empty moonsault to the outside from the top by Volador. Rey hit a fisherman's neckbreaker and then a splash from the top. Volador kicked his legs out on the top and then hit this massive top rope rana. Etc. Some of it wasn't so good, like Rey leaping from the apron to do god knows what (a double axe handle?) and eating a superkick in a hugely contrived spot. More was good than bad but the problem was, nothing mattered. Instead of selling anything or showing the cumulative damage, they'd go back to trying to hype the crowd or just on to the next move. I know this wasn't a heavily pushed for match or anything, but I have a real feeling it's going to be endemic of what I'm going to see in watching 2015 Volador. Good action but frustrating fluff.

The top rope Rana was really the signal that things were over. It was big enough that it took Zacarias to charge in to save things. I was probably too excited by that. He even hit his 619 after breaking up the pin, but a bit of miscommunication later (Rey dropkicked the poor parrot), Volador hit another backcracker for the win. By my metrics (which are probably not your own) I didn't really see any sign here that Volador was a good wrestler, let alone the best of the year. But I shall watch on.

GIFS:

Reaction to the piledriver/pin in the segunda:

Zacarias' reaction:

And this guy's reaction too: