Tuesday is French Catch Day: Weber! Salah! Don! Trujillo! Bordes! Bouvet! Samurai! Payen!

MD: As a heads up, the audio on the first set of matches is a bit messed up. For me, it worked best if I just listened with my left earbud and not the right. The footage is the footage.

Arpan Weber vs Artif Salah (JIP) 6/14/76

MD: We get the last seven minutes of this. I don't think we have much more Weber but he's looked very good in the two matches we've seen so far. A real slugger, with a tendency to bounce back off the ropes with big shots. He has a lot of stuff: a butterfly suplex (one of the first we've seen?), a backbreaker with a grind, his fall away slam with a float over follow-up, and of course chops and headbutts and an ability to take all of his opponent's stuff. Good presence and I would have liked to see him against LeDuc or Corn or Bibi or any number of other wrestlers from the footage. Salah was game to fight back against him, having more stylist tools like dropkicks and headcissors takeovers but going shot-for-shot when it was called for. They were fighting for the draw here and showed but it was still good hard-hitting action for the seven minutes.

Juan Gil Don vs Tomas Trujillo 6/14/76

MD: This was a totally different animal than the last Don match. It started off much the same with Trujillo feeding into all of Don's traps and spots. Trujilo had his own climb up armdrag which he used here. It looked like it was going to be another straight up Don showcase like the Tejero match. Then it turned hard left as Trujillo tossed him out and posted him, opening him up and taking a real advantage. From there, Don had to use his tricks and savvy to come back again and again as Trujillo leaned on him. It gave the match plenty of drama and made it feel like a complete match, all heightened by the blood, by Trujillo being a good bully, by Don's spectacular stuff (including those flipping mare that someone, anyone has to steal! I never do this, but here's a gif. Steal them!:

You get the sense that they wanted to get him over in the Tejero match and once he was they could do more fleshed out encounters like this. 

Le Samurai/Pierre Payen vs Walter Bordes/Gerard Bouvet 7/18/76 

MD: We had this back in 2014, but it was only the first two falls. Now we have it complete. That's a great word for it, for it really is a very, very complete tag, going a few minutes longer than a lot of the ones we've seen lately. The first ten-fifteen minutes is one of the best shines we've seen, just the stylists pulling out all sorts of spots and clowning the heels again and again. The last six minutes are hugely celebratory with the fans singing and chanting and having a wonderful time. In the middle there are about three separate face-in-peril sequences and comebacks, including one stemming from Bordes absolutely wiping himself out on a missed top rope move.

Bordes and Bouvet made for a great unit. Bordes always kept up on the new moves and spots of the time and here threw a chancery suplex followed by a German suplex, for instance. He also worked the apron quite well showing excitement for his partner on big spots. Bouvet had a lot of fun little variations, leg picks and nice escapes, including a sort of skin the cat headscissors takeover that was deep and measured and popped the crowd huge, and a fallaway slam that almost caved in a skull, but also did a dropkick variation on the bit where both heels are tied up in opposite ropes and the stylist charges in again and again. Because this got so much time, everything felt fairly balanced, even if the drama was done by the end and they were into full on partying. You wish that they had worked out exactly how to time and maximize the hot tags with some of the ref distractions and out of position tags that didn't count, but Bordes and Bouvet always came in fiery and the crowd went up for it. Samurai didn't have too much in the way of complex wrestling, but I thought he was properly theatrical (and Payen properly mean), working very big with chops both missed and hit and doing things like getting into a shoving match with the announcer. Very worthwhile tag and I'm glad we have it complete now.