Tuesday is French Catch Day: Tom! Lang! Mercier! Sanniez!

Tiny Tom vs Cowboy Lang 7/3/82

MD: This is one we thought we had at some point and that might be out there but we never did find it until now. We come in 10 minutes JIP and go another 10 and it was quite good actually. Delaporte is the ref and of course he was perfect for this scenario. What i liked about it though is that there was a decent amount of wrestling between the comedy spots. They went hand to hand repeatedly and Lang especially had some nice stuff including a roll back wristlock takedown and a roll through double arm where he tied Tom up. Tom was more apt to use roughneck tactics, step on the toes or toss Lang out. I bet if we had the first ten there'd be even more wrestling and this would be even better.

The comedy absolutely hit. A lot of it are spots you've seen before like Delaporte catching Tom out of a pin attempt kick out or Tom being pushed off on a figure four and crotching Delaporte. High class stuff but Delaporte's reactions pushed it all over the top. Right at the twenty minute announcement they went home with it with Lang winning on an airplane spin (though making sure to dizzily wave to Delaporte before falling on Tom). And everyone was happy with what they got.

Marc Mercier vs Albert Sanniez 7/3/82

MD: How good is even old Sanniez? Let me put it this way. If this had been the first Catch match we came across, instead of Cesca vs Catanzaro, we would have thought that young Marc Mercier was one of the best wrestlers in the world. Sanniez is just that good. We had a few matches of his throughout the footage but not nearly as many as we would have liked so it's great to see him here, even if a lot of the goal was to put a spotlight on Guy's 20-21 year old kid. 

The first ten minutes of this was Sanniez really putting him through his paces with a lot of great wrestling, hold after hold, with Mercier having all the counters you'd want, including up and overs and everything else. At the ten minute mark, Mercier did a cartwheel out of a throw and Sanniez got annoyed and clocked him and the match opened up. Lots of little moments of personality here where he'd feign that he didn't use a closed fist. Mercier was rough around the edges but he had a wild sort of abandon which made some things look better and some worse. Sanniez went for a flip bomb at one point and Mercier didn't make it over and landed in a nasty way. 

They'd ground things back down with quick pin exchanges or other bits of wrestling before going back to the moves and it was all quite good. Mercier took a nasty bump over the top and sold it big until his comeback, which didn't quite connect for me. Just lack of experience and an unwillingness to look vulnerable. If he had gotten leaned on just a bit longer it would have meant all the more. But in general, this was good and I'm putting most of that on Sanniez.

SR: It's a look at late career Albert Sanniez and young Marc Mercier. God what a size mismatch this was. Mercier towered over the old veteran. But all that be damned, they did some really good wrestling here. Mercier is a perfectly competent young athletic guy and Sanniez is too much of a master to not go hard into some slick exchanges. Some really good stuff early on. For some reason we haven't seen many highly technical matches in the colour footage, maybe they didn't make TV, maybe they weren't archived, maybe no one could do them anymore, so this was a bit of a flashback to the glory days of lightweight catch. Sanniez ended up dropping Mercier on his head with an ill fated attempt at a powerbomb and it seemed they lost their way a bit at that time. The bout fizzled along with Sanniez being seemingly too proud to let Mercier outwrestle him and the bout failed to build steam. There were some sick manchettes and both guys threw punches, so it's not like it was a bad bout or anything, but it made me want to go back and check out the matches from the glory days. This had a good ending though with Mercier hitting a missile dropkick of all things and then at least getting a good win over the old coot.