MLJ: Cien Caras vs Siglo XX

1987-12-04 @ Arena México
Cien Caras vs Siglo XX

To my great shame, I never finished the DVDVR 80s lucha set. I dove in having never seen any lucha, stumbled through six discs, and decided I needed to start from scratch and work the style out. Three hundred matches later, here I am. With the Portland and Puerto Rico sets active, I'm not planning on rushing, but now and again I want to watch a match and get through discs 7-10. Most of the matches on those discs I haven't seen yet and they're some of the best stuff we have, from what I understand.

This was one of EMLL's big year ending matches from 1987. Caras isn't a wrestler I have a huge grasp of. We have tons of old man Dinamitas matches and I know Eric stands by at least one or two of those runs for gritty brawling, but it wasn't something I naturally gravitated towards. I appreciate him as a draw, even today, and obviously he had some strong connection with the crowd to be so. I just haven't seen enough of him in his prime. He was around 38 here, so that's close. Siglo was Enrique Vera's brother. I imagine I saw him as The Killer at some point but nothing comes to mind.

This was a rudo vs rudo apuestas match. I'm glad that I'm not ranking these, to be honest, because this would be a tough one to place. The good was very good. It's safe to say that Caras was good at what he did, and what he did was brawling, and a general sense of control, keeping Siglo out of the ring when he wanted him out of the ring, catching him with that downward elbow to the back of the head when he came in, working over a wound, and making strong use of the ring as a weapon.

Siglo, meanwhile, bled well, sold decently, and garnered enough sympathy to get the crowd far more behind him towards the end of the match than the beginning. Unfortunately, some of his stuff just seemed off. His dropkicks were memorable in a bad way. His big submission, a rowboat (and I should know the name of that in Spanish by now, huh?) looked pretty disastrous the first time and even more so the second, as a tease in the tercera, though that worked out because them crashing into the ropes in the set up gave it an accidental momentum.

It all came together just enough to make things work. The primera and segunda were short, but heated. I liked how, even though he was in control, Caras gave Siglo a couple of kickouts in the segunda before putting him away. All of the revenge spots in the tercera were effective, and the finish was smart, with Caras dodging one plancha too many by Siglo and nailing him with part of the ringside area for the countout. It was smart, just maybe not as definitive as you'd want in a match like this. In general, I came out of this with more regard for Caras than I came in with.