MLJ: Blue Panther Lightning Matches 6: Blue Panther vs Boby Zavala in a lightning match

Aired: 2014-07-20
Taped: 2014-07-20 @ Arena Coliseo
Blue Panther vs Boby Zavala in a lightning match

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x21tm3a

This probably isn't a good enough match go to go Dailymotion for. It wasn't for lack of effort, though. Let's put it this way: this could be a very interesting match to watch in five years if Boby moves up the card, gets more experienced, and really settles in as a great talent. I think he's got the potential for it and I think he's positioned by CMLL in a way that it might work out. Unless I'm mistaken, he'll be on Fantasticamania, so onward and upwards and all that. At that point, it could be interesting to see this as it pertains to his development. As it is now, it's just a sort of crummy lightning match, where the wrestlers tried but couldn't pull it together. It's more damning for Panther than Zavala in my mind, because he didn't get him through the match nearly as well as I thought he would.

So, what went wrong? Execution mostly. The effort was there. I'd even say the ideas were there, but the actually execution fell apart. That's not the most important thing in the world to me, but it does stand out, and here, the recovery and the covering up of it just weren't good enough.

In some ways, this was an interesting pairing. I think Zavala's strengths are in his facial expressions. I know he wears the cowboy hat and all that, but he always comes off as a barely-in-shape frat boy huffing and puffing through his matches, but in a good way. He portrays this sort of frustrated exasperation when getting beat on by a tecnico. Panther, on the other hand, has great expressions too, able to garner sympathy and portray real pain with that sort of withered, aged look. So whenever Panther made just about anything work, Zavala was able to make it mean something and the same was true when Zavala locked in a hold.

It just still wasn't enough to overcome things like a flubbed snapmare or a lot of not great attempts at a surfboard, or that same rolling keylock from the Virus match, but here it wasn't rolling so much as as thumping about in a vaguely circular manner. Even then, the ideas were good. Zavala kept trying to go for that foot-assisted surfboard. When that didn't work, he tried multiple attempts at a full nelson. The last time they went to it (after the first dive of the match), Zavala seemed too winded to even put it on, and Panther was just able to casually snatch an arm and take him down.

So, to recap, what they went for? Pretty good. How it came out? Not so good, though to Panther's credit, he both hit a nice diving top rope rana and took a bump out of the ring that he probably shouldn't have. The match more or less built to two dives, a Panther tope after a Boby Z Ultimo Guerrero corner knee bump in the middle and the Zavala one at the end (after said bump Panther probably shouldn't have taken). After the second dive, they laid around a bunch selling, drawing a double count out.

Ultimately, it was good that Boby got to have the experience of a match like this with a wrestler like Panther, and hopefully he learned something, but this just wasn't good.