Finlay May Be Warm In Flanders, But its Draughty in the Trenches

Finlay v. Rey Mendoza Jr. WNC 9/20/12 - EPIC

So cool that this match got to happen in the Finlay window. Mendoza is the unmasked Villano V, and I think the Villanos are the most Finlayish of the luchadores. We get all that we would want from this match up, starts out with very aggressive mat work, all of the counters had a bunch of struggle, nothing was smooth or fancy. Finlay reversing a grounded headlock is just beautiful, he grabs a leg and twists until Mendoza breaks and he puts on a knee crank of his own. Mendoza starts the brawl, as he cracks Finlay with a clothesline over the top rope, and hits him with a great old fat man tope. The last half is full of nasty clotheslines, over hand rights, and nasty bodyslams. This was gritty as hell, felt like a 70s crime movie as a wrestling match.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE FINLAY

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Lucha Underground Episode 14: A Shot of El Patron Workrate Report

ER: Liked the Alberto/Dario interaction, loved the way Dario just changed the subject when Alberto asked him about the key.

PAS: Not a ton about Matanaza this week, I had some suggestions last week, but if what the WON says is true, the only real use of Vince Russo would be as a monster kept in a cage. Dario said he liked to destroy pretty things, and Vince Russo is the one guy wrestling fans would truly look at with terror.

1. Argenis vs. Fenix

ER: Total spotfest, but I dug it. Argenis didn't really look that good, but his two rana variations did and I'm a sucker for a smooth rana. This was one of the better Fenix performances, his rope assisted flip dive was crazy. There was no selling or transitions to speak of, but they never made any allusions to those things so it didn't really bother me. I think that's the key with me, no selling really bugs me when it's sporadic throughout a match, but if they establish right out of the gate "this is just going to be 5 minutes of our highlight reel" then I can just enjoy it like junk food.

PAS: Sure, this was a nice job showing all of their stuff,  Fenix needs to never throw a punch or kick again, still some cool dives, and they didn't make either guy do more then they need to do.

ER: Damn the Mil Muertes and Big Ryck vignettes killed it. Muertes lifting up Catrina by the throat like Darth Vader, Ryck still cool smoking cigars because he recognized the cigar didn't hurt him, people did, Muertes walking down the dimly lit hallway like Maniac Cop, loved the way Ryck was filmed and loved the cigar smoke as his face comes into light. Great stuff here.

PAS: Yeah those were both awesome, coolest Muertes has ever looked and Ryck as Man on Fire Denzel bent for vicious revenge is going to rule.

ER: I also love how they use Mariachi El Bronx. That's a sweet little bonus for a house band. Usually when there's a wrestling show with a band playing it's some lousy metal band that are friends of the promoter.

2. Son of Havoc vs. Johnny Mundo

ER: Not my thing. It's funny I just mentioned a spotfest that pretends there's going to be selling vs. one that just goes for broke with spots, and here we have the other side of that. We get Mundo screaming about his knee about one minute into the match, and then never see that injury again, yet we get to hear Striker and Vampiro talking constantly about his blown out knee, how Havoc is hooking that bad knee, how "that's not good for the knee" every time Mundo does a backflip and lands on his feet. It's like enjoying a B movie that knows exactly what it is, as opposed to a movie with big aspirations that just falls on its face. There were a couple cool spots in this, my favorite being Havoc running away from a Mundo dive but Mundo using his parkour (on a BAD KNEE!!) to flip back through the ropes and dive diagonally out of the ring to grab him anyway. But this was one of those matches where I just keep hoping for it to end after awhile.

PAS: Big mistake to book Mundo with a knee injury. He is a guy with some real limitations, and selling is one of them, I imagine if he had a hurt arm or neck, he wouldn't need to limit his offense, here he just ignores it and does all of his stuff anyway. The announcers go on and on about his blown out knee, but if this match was on mute, no way you would know it. I enjoyed Havoc in this, seems weird to have Barry Horowitz have cooler spots then your pushed highflyers, but he really hits some cool stuff, that fake where he topes the ring rope is awesome looking.

3. Ricky Mandel vs. Pentagon Jr.

ER: Feels like they should have shown highlights of Pentagon breaking Famous B's arm the other week, but I suppose it makes sense they didn't with him doing the same thing to Mandel. Although this promotion doesn't really do replays which is odd. They show a bunch of "last week on" at the beginning of the show, but there are a lot of times when a guy is walking to the ring and we hear "we remember last week when…" but there's no clip of the thing they're talking about, just the guy walking to the ring. But they are going in the right direction with Pentagon, feeding some lower tier guys to him and letting him walk circles around them. I wonder if this is going to lead to a bunch of one armed men coming back to haunt Pentagon?

PAS: Man Pentagon is a nasty fucker, I loved the counter into the backbreaker and the kick to the spine. I don't know who the Master is going to be, I think Vampiro is too genial at this point, LA Park would be perfect, but I am not sure how the lucha politics would work.

ER: I don't know the details about this, but Alberto feels like a pretty big "get" for them. I also don't know the details surrounding him leaving WWE, but hopefully this isn't one of those things where Vince decides to buy up a bunch of LU guys and then never use them. I mean, it would be amusing to see Vince buy Son of Havoc or other guys that have gone through developmental that they didn't originally want.

PAS: Promo was really good, Alberto really felt almost Eddieish, although if Russo is really coming in, he better get used to neckbeards making unfunny Mexican jokes behind his back, maybe Alberto will slap the shit out of him too. Think they hotshotted the Texano Jr. arrival, feels like that could have waited a week. Nothing great in the ring this week, but a lot of the booking issues I had a couple of weeks ago seem to be solved.


LUCHA UNDERGROUND MASTER LIST

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MLJ: 2010: A Garza Odyssey 17: Convergence

Taped 2010-05-16 @Arena México
El Alebrije, Histeria, Maniaco vs Brazo de Plata, Héctor Garza, Toscano

Porky, Héctor, Toscano vs Alebrije, Histeria...

Embedding isn't working well on this one, unfortunately.

So, this is where it all comes together as if I knew what I was doing from the beginning. I really didn't. Garza had been straddling the line for a better part of a month now. He'd been having dissension with two sets of tecnicos, really, with Fantasma and Mascara on the one side (and he walked out on them costing them the trios title) and Porky and Toscano on the other, and of course had won the Gran Alternativa with a rudo, despite claiming that he still wasn't. Meanwhile, Los Invasores had invaded, most of them being previous AAA wrestlers.

All of that set the stage for this match which was the first time on TV that Garza teamed with Porky and Toscano since walking out on his other partners and since winning the Gran Alternativa the week before. It was also the first time he was paired up against the Invasores. Unsurprisingly things came to a head, though maybe in potentially ambiguous ways.

Like usual for matches of this project, this was the Garza show, with him stooging and hamming and emoting and everything else, while the Invasores got to show their dominance, Porky was able to be Porky and Toscano was able to fight against huge odds and show righteous fury towards Garza. As the culmination of a turn, it was anti-climactic but some of that was due to the sheer length of said turn. My gut says that they hadn't really worked out the whole Invasores thing when they began it.

This was my first look at Maniaco and he didn't really stand out as being much different from Histeria, but his mask was awesome, with a fully on bat in the middle of it, with eyes and fangs and everything. Over the top and it fit in perfectly with his stablemates. By the way, they had a bunch of little promos/videos with the invaders around this time, usually with Psicosis II doing the talking. They were all set in some sort of backstage factory type lot and involved them destroying things to high effect. They definitely played up on the wild elements they brought to the table.

The story of the match was Garza doing everything humanly possible to avoid tagging in and his partners getting more and more frustrated with him. Porky started the match by charging Alebrije on the ramp, which was pretty great, but then the rudos used their numerical advantage to take over. Even Kemonito looked like he was going to kill Garza as he kept pulling his hand back in or faking a leg injury. It was a distraction like that which let Cuije nail the poor little monkey guy from behind and knock him off the apron. Immediately thereafter, Cuije let himself be used as a projectile bomb onto Porky and the rudos pinned him. They followed that up with a brutal double armdrag into an Alebrije Power Bomb on Toscano, who then ate a Maniaco senton bomb as well to end the primera.

Then things got pretty perilous. First, Garza "accidentally" stands on Kemonito for about twenty seconds. Then, the rudos pulled out this insane spiked metal bat, the sort of thing you never see in CMLL during this era, and they spent about three minutes menacing Garza with it. They made a big deal out of this before Garza finally escaped untouched and started selling the leg again on the outside as Toscano pushed him. They went back in, did a reset and some decent sequence with Toscano before once again making a big deal about Garza coming in, this time, forced by his partners, against Alebrije. Even at this point Porky was trying to rouse the crowd to encourage Garza. Or mockingly encourage him. And I suppose to either their credit or their lack of credit, there was some animosity there. Garza played his character, trying to avoid conflict, going for the time out , but Alebrije kept pushing, and Garza fought back. While the bat sequence was cute, there wasn't any real drama here, except for whether or not Garza wasn't just a rudo now, but with the invaders.

We've seen dozens of great heel turns in tag matches where the turner avoids tags and contact until the last second. That didn't happen here. Garza just came off as so amazingly irritating that everyone wanted to hit him. That would have been well and good if he wasn't to be revealed at a press conference a few days later as one of the leaders of the faction. It made the back half of this match, once he started to get physical, seem weird. The tercera ended with Garza knocking Toscano off the top so the rudos could pin him and then just laying down so they could pin him, but we'd seen behavior like that out of him over the few weeks before. He seemed like he had turned up the passive aggressiveness but not like this was a big stop on the "turn" roadmap. Still, watching him stand on Kemonito (especially after how pissed the monkey was at him earlier in the match) was pretty damn entertaining, so the match had that going for it.

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