2015 Ongoing Match of the Year List

26. Virus v. Avisman Chilanga Mask 4/12

PAS: Hey Avisman!! I used to love that dude back during the glory days of IWRG. He was always a guy who could work on the mat, and really developed into a great brawler, and then he disappeared (along with other awesome guys like Chico Che and Freelance) so IWRG could be all crappy fake Capos sons. This is Virus working a straight maestro style, focused on leg and arm locks and cool standing counters. Avisman is perfectly comfortable working this match, he has some very cool abdominal stretch variations, and looks perfectly comfortable countering arms and legs, great performance and I hope he shows up more. Virus is great at working this kind of match too, it is different then what he does in CMLL, and while I liked this a lot, I kind of wanted him to work more of his title match style so we could see Avisman stretch out a bit. This was a great painting, but I wanting to see them use more of their pallete.

ER: I really loved this, my favorite Virus performance of 2015, and Avisman is a cool guy to see him match up against. This could have easily devolved into heatless holds trading as there are hardly any strikes to speak of, but these two didn't let that come close to happening. These holds had meaning and Virus always looked like he was going for a finish, working over moves with actual substance. Avisman doesn't have the grace of other luchadors, which I thought really worked to the advantage of this kind of maestro style mat work. He would thud into the mat, land tailbone first on a double leg, his sunset flip and code red looked like actual scrambling pinfall attempts instead of large looping gestures. And the best thing he brought was, oddly, Avisman is a great screamer. His screaming helped Virus' holds as much as Virus being awesome helped is holds. Virus was so damn good at showing progression of holds, never ever making it look like he was just holding a guy static to fill time. You see Virus do a single leg, you can see 6+ different points of progression through it. You see him lock it in, you see him grab his own hand to tighten the hold, you see him grit his teeth which immediately gives the impression he's wrenching it in even more, you see him broaden his squat which bends the leg and back even more, and he does this stuff for every hold! This is about as far away as you can possibly get from Muta lying in a legbar for two minutes. And Avisman helps this move progression, as he yelps at all the right times, howls when an arm starts getting bent back, really made Virus sound like a sadistic dungeon master. Virus kept working different nasty bow and arrow variations, a standing abdominal stretch type one, one with him on his back, the classic knee into opponents back style, and he kept going back to that the entire match. So when Virus hit s his killer chopblock and locks it on again, it really felt like the finish. I loved Avisman's stiff unpolished counters to Virus' almost muscle memory skill, and this may have actually been my favorite of the last couple years of mat-based indy lucha.


2015 MOTY MASTER LIST