Tuesday is French Catch Day: Corne! Mercier! Samurai!

Jean Corne/Marc Mercier vs Les Samurai 8/21/82

MD: On this last pass with new footage I am a little wistful. Maybe we find some more later but it's just nice to see Jean Corne one last time, even if it was a bit later in his career. This is obviously early in Marc's career. He's only twenty here, I think, and this was a bit of a showcase for his dropkicks, or it was supposed to be. Some hit better than others, though overall he had a number of spots down and felt like he belonged in there more or less, even if he wasn't near the level of Corne or the Yellow Samurai. 

Really loved seeing Corne do his thing here. At the start, he rolled through a mare, and then another, and then just kept rolling and rolling around the ring. The Yellow Samurai then got rolled right out of the ring on a mare. He could still rope run with the best of them and he had some great step over armdrags and what not. The first fall was a short sprint with the stylists having an advantage until the Samurai went dirty first. That led to an abrupt pin off a slam on Corne. He came back fairly quickly in the second fall, which Mercier took eventually with a missile dropkick and body press. It was pretty back and forth overall and they tried to give Mercier a decent amount of shine. There was some ref chicanery towards the end but not enough to really shift the match too much. I'm not sure this would entirely be a memorable one in the grand scheme of the footage, but it was a nice tag that could have been in 72 as well as 82 (a compliment) and a nice final look at Corne. 

SR: Another one of those early 80s tags. Points of curiosity here: they had young fresh upstart Mercier teamed with old guard Jean Corne. Corne could still go a little, although he was more limited. He got a lot of mileage out of his slick foreward rolls. Talk about working smart. Mercier is talented and athletic enough and there were some good exchanges to start. Next point of curiosity: the heels actually did some damage to Corne early. Maybe they were working an injury angle or something since it seemed Cornes back was messed up from a basic body slam and he struggled to keep going. The Samurai did right thing and immediately began targetting his back, with one of them hitting a cool flip senton. It wasn't super expanded upon as Corne ends up making a fairly simple tag and it's not really brought up again safe for another minor injury scare later, but it's a bit of flavor that crept into the old formula of these tags. Other than that the Samurai didn't do a ton here besides bumping a lot and working some choke holds. It was a bit repetitive here and there but overall a solid effort.