MLJ: Dragon Lee vs Virus/Casas 8: Virus © vs Dragon Lee for the CMLL World Super Lightweight Championship

Aired: 2014-12-13
Taped: 2014-12-09 @ Arena México
Virus © vs Dragon Lee for the CMLL World Super Lightweight Championship

Virus is great. Virus with a game opponent, one that he can really do something with is even better. I'll admit that this entire mini-project is something of a cheat. I'd learn a hell of a lot more watching Dragon Lee against inferior opponents, but what is very much apparent through a match as good as this one, is that either he was a very quick study, Virus is simply that good, or the nature of the lucha title match, in and of itself, simply makes wrestlers look better. I think it's a good chunk of A and a ton of B, though probably a little bit of C as well, as it pertains to storytelling.

This was a blast. I know that Kamaitachi and Dragon Lee have had some big matches over the last year, but I can't imagine myself liking them more than I liked this. That's wholly on me, though. I was going nuts not for the big spots but for how both wrestlers were using little punches and little leverage moves to get in and out of holds in the primera. Stuff like this:

How cool is that? He didn't have to do that. I can't speak of why he's doing things like this, if it's due to his training or just due to working with Virus, but that he finds them worth his time in a setting like this is something that actively excites me for the rest of Dragon Lee's career. It's not the sort of thing you unlearn. If he finds it valuable and worth doing now, he'll probably still find it valuable five years from now. That, to me, is as exciting as any of his big spots or dives. Striking a balance between the big things and the little things is what makes a wrestler great, and he showed the potential for that in this primera.

It was absolutely good, with the sense of struggle that you need in something like this. They were making each other work for everything and through doing that, it makes everything mean something more. Everything escalated. Struggle and escalation, meaning and direction, suspension of belief and purpose behind what's being done; this is the stuff that makes for a great title match primera and they had it here. Finally, they picked up the pace, with a few counters and teases before Dragon Lee locked on his spider arm-bar.

The segunda was relatively breif but still good. I liked that Dragon Lee started with the distinct advantage since you usually see a reset here. Virus had to really fight his way back, with escapes, like this one, which I thought was worth gif'ing:

counters, retreats, and ultimately a dodge during rope running. It was a very incrimental transition, leading into a pick up/drop down and a stump puller. I really liked the way they chose to do it.

Then the tercera was all out action. Once again, they didn't start with a reset, instead making Dragon Lee work to regain and even footing. It wasn't an outright beatdown like you'd get in a mask match but there was a distinct advantage from Virus up until the point that Lee was able to string together a series of counters (see below), punctuating it with a tope.

If the first half of the match was Virus dictating the tempo and Dragon Lee keeping up on the mat, then the back half was Lee really getting to show off and Virus being there to feed into his offense and serve as his base (while still being admirably showy himself). They brought things up and down, trading counters and building to things like the following: I don't usually gif dives, but here's the slow motion version of this one because it was spectucular:

Really, I don't want to write up too much of the tercera. I'd rather people who haven't seen it yet see it for themselves. It had call backs and paralleled moves, and it all led into an exciting finishing run that ended with Virus pulling it out as it just wasn't Dragon Lee's time yet. He came out looking stronger than he came in though, even in defeat, which is one of the very best things wrestling can ever accomplish. Instead of me going more in depth than that, let me sum it up with Virus' second, Disturbio, showing you how he felt about everything: