My Lucha Journey: Rush vs Shocker Part 5: La Máscara, Rush, Titán vs Felino, Mr. Niebla, Negro Casas

aired 2014-02-22
taped 2014-02-18 @ Arena México
La Máscara, Rush, Titán vs Felino, Mr. Niebla, Negro Casas for the Mexican National Trios Championship

I'll be honest. I thought this was maybe a different match, namely the 2/21 trios that I'll be hitting next (give or take a brief Valiente interlude) and that had both Shocker and Negro Casas on the rudo side and ended with Casas stretchered out. As it was, this was probably not something I necessarily had to watch as part of this sequence. I suppose it did set up Rush wanting to get back at Casas a few nights later. As a brief aside, I don't get why Rush is part of a named team with Marco and Maximo but he has the belts with these two.

I'm glad I watched it though, both because it was different from anything else I'd seen so far and because it was a little frustrating. The latter is okay. I'm trying to get a sense of, at the least, CMLL as a whole, and that means taking the good with the bad, and hopefully figuring out why the good is good and why the bad might be flawed. This match had a lot of both.

It was also one of the first Trios Title Matches I'd seen, and I really wasn't expecting it to be worked much like a Title match at all. I was happily surprised to see they did make some effort of it mainly because I thought the nature of a trios match would make everything too chaotic to really work in the primera caida showmanship and matwork. Instead, the inherent pairing-off nature allowed for some of that while not ignoring either the shtick that you usually get in a Peste Negra match or the intensity of Rush vs Casas. Felino and Titan did a pretty good job with their opening matwork. I'll talk about title matches more as I see more, but if I judged things on points (which is a horrible, terrible idea), I think the points would be in the categories of "sense of struggle," "intricacy," "smoothness," and "build" with the understanding that struggle and smoothness do make a tough balance to carry. Here, though, it's just one part of greater whole of a trios match (which sort of tosses "build" out, but it was smooth without seeming too cooperative and intricate enough for my needs) and I'm glad that it was included. It was also nice to see that element out of Felino, who has been almost all shtick in what I'v seen so far. Likewise, Casas and Rush absolutely brought the intensity. They manage to distill so much character and purpose in battering one another that I could watch it all day.

It was a fairly long match with high stakes, so I did wonder coming in why it hadn't been talked about more. After seeing it, it made sense. The match did have its flaws. First of all, Mascara and Niebla didn't pair off well. Look, nobody takes a comedy bump onto the apron quite like Niebla, but it felt really out of place here. The two of them seemed sluggish at best and not always on the same page and while I fully believe that shtick can work within the confines of a match like this, it didn't here. The far larger problem was the crowd, though, or at least that the match didn't really factor them in to things (save for the finish). The rudos took the primera caida after a cool alley-oop into a cross body. After that, there was a pretty long rudo control/heat segment on Rush. Now, none of the tecnicos had the crowd here, but Rush, who wasn't dialing back the dickishness at all in this match, as he sometimes does, was pretty much reviled. By structuring things this way, when Mascara/Titan finally made their comeback, the crowd wanted nothing to do with it and everything, including their big dives, fell flat.

The match did come back around somewhat, because the commercial break between falls allowed for a reset of sorts. Rush took the segunda caida after a power bomb on Casas making sure to hold on to the ropes; after that they were able to start building towards the rudos winning and the crowd celebrating. It doesn't help how tone-deaf the second fall was though. There's some good stuff towards the end like Felino (and I love how he randomly puts his mask on sometimes between falls. I don't know why but I get a kick out of that) eating a great Titan 'rana from the apron on the floor and shortly thereafter a huge dive, as well as some frustrating stuff like Niebla popping back up after a sort of laborious Quebradora sequence. Ultimately it ended with Casas and Rush and a pumped up crowd. Rush got his comeuppance in the form of the Casita and an elated crowd cheered on their new rudo champions.

Like I said, I'm glad I saw it and it had plenty of good moments, but it didn't leave me feeling great about Mascara or Niebla in this setting and the segunda caida definitely wasn't structured for the crowd that was watching it.