MLJ: Blue Panther Lightning Matches 3: Blue Panther vs Virus

CMLL Guerreros del Ring on 52MX: 2013-05-18
taped 2013-05-12 @ Arena Coliseo
1) Blue Panther vs Virus in a lightning match

Another ringer of a match in the midst of this. I should be watching something more topical. Topical gets more hits, I think, but this is just a ten minute match and everyone should see it because it's ten great minutes. I think Virus might be the king of the lightning matches. He just has the perfect mix of matwork mastery and being able to pick up the pace. I wouldn't mind at all going through this exercise with him sometime as well.

The Casas match was personal. This was just business. That had momentum shifts and heated holds. This was worked differently, with exchanges and reversals leading to standoffs and resets. There were, I think, four distinct standoffs in the ten minutes. In that regard, it was sort of the best low stakes indy mat exchange imaginable. I'll take it.

As always, the small details are a joy to watch with these guys. Something as little as Virus going for a back elbow to halt a reversal and Panther turning it into a short arm scissors makes my day as much as any big spot. Likewise, the way Virus would try to control Panther with an elbow on his back. A lot of this was that control, just keeping two of the deadliest mat wrestlers in the world from getting an opportunity to do damage.

There's a ton of stuff I could gif, but let's go with this roll back keylock (Is that a keylock? Let's call it a keylock):

The match was pretty much ten minutes of that sort of thing before spiraling into yet another draw. Hey, the way I see it, we got ten minutes with them instead of eight and a finish. These lightning matches are more or less exhibitions instead of complete matches. Sometimes they're filler, sometimes they're a teaser to set up a longer match that was meant to draw. In general, it's best to take them for what they were meant to be (which is not always the way I think we should be judging wrestling; here though, it makes sense). As exhibitions go, this was a really good one.