MLJ: Lightning Match Bonus: Heddi Karaoui vs Hechicero

Aired: 2015-10-23
taped: 2015-10-23 @ Arena México
Heddi Karaoui vs Hechicero in a lightning match

I'm off schedule here due to our stalwart desire to have a new post every day and my Monday match having to fill the gap a few days early (and how long have we kept that up? Should have put money on it). I could toss two matches up this week and take it easy but it just feels wrong. So, let's shoot for three this week and hotshot in a lightning match from the last week or two.

Hechicero vs Heddi Karaoui. This was to push an All Elite show a couple of days later where these two were in a tag. I don't think Heddi's been booked on a CMLL show since so this was really just another case of CMLL ignoring its own needs (whatever those might be) to get over something that's at least branded non-CMLL. I've read what's out there on this and it still feels like a successful band using its own resources to push one member's vanity side product. At the end of the day, so long as they own Arena Mexico, there's probably some profit to be made, but if anyone explained how the money worked here, I must have missed it.

Heddi is new to me. He's worked a bunch of these All Elite shows and he apparently has a back ground in the NJPW dojo and a lot of indy showings over the last few years. I thought he matched up well to Hechicero here, trying, at least, to hang with all of the esoteric and imaginative offense thrown about. I'm not going to say it all worked; he would have been served by grounding his stuff 20% or so, especially at the beginning and the end. Early on he seemed about a half step behind on the pin exchanges and the finishing strech had a few strikes that were just a little off. In general, he did a good job though.

This was really the Hechicero show, though. He's an incredibly special worker, and in one very specific way, I'd say he is a great one. He's probably the most imaginative worker I've ever seen. In almost every match, he'll do something you haven't seen him do before. The greatness? That he generally tacks it all together and makes it work. He's not the lucha version of 1998 ECW Nova, though he easily could be. Sometimes it gets too much. Sometimes it gets in the way of the match. Usually, though? Usually he pulls it off by the skin of his teeth and it's really fascinating to watch. Sometimes it's just as interesting to see if he's going to manage it or not as it is to see what tricked out bit of lucha he'll apparate next.

So while it's easy to focus on all of the cool stuff he did, it's the little things too. He was the one who drew back after the pin exchanges and after his rolling around the ring with a headlock pin (which is different from the usual rolls I've seen him do:

and let things breathe for a moment. He'd also stop later on after hitting a nice inside the ring springboard dropkick to channel his imaginary fire. Little things, but they're the sort that kept this from being a total spotfest and let the crowd take a breath in anticipation of what would come next.

There are all of the little jabs and elbows and leverage moves too. He has a lot of offense that is contrived on paper, so it's nice that he takes that extra bit of time to set them up believably. It's something as simple as sneaking in a rabbit punch to set up his spinning dive in or the way he'll roll with an ankle lock to gain that extra bit of leverage:

He's just so versatile and brings so much to the table. Look at my favorite exchange of the match. Heddi had him in an armbar, so he managed to deadlift him out of it, which would have been impressive and would have stood out even on its own. Heddi hung on, though, so he ultimately laid in three elbows and very smoothly turned it into a pumphandle pick up.

It doesn't always work but it does more than you'd think. The finishing stretch played back on that anklelock and on the kicks that Heddi had been doing. Hechicero caught a kick, went for the anklelock again. Heddi tried to reverse with some back elbows he'd used previously in the match but Hechicero ducked them, tied him up, and that was that. It could have been a little smoother but the effort was there and the level of difficulty was there, and it's just so much fun to watch Hechicero walk the tightrope of sublime absurdity in the middle of Arena Mexico.