MLJ: Recent Uploads: Hector Garza vs Averno

2008-03-07 @ Arena México
Héctor Garza vs Averno

This was a recent upload. It's directly on the path to Garza vs Perro, Jr., and that's a trajectory I've been avoiding. It's probably silly too, but that's one of those path that you can only experience once and that I never would be able to again, so I'm really just waiting until I've seen a lot more Perros del Mal stuff and when I feel like I've seen enough other stuff. It's sentimental on my part but there you go. I'm lucky in that I've gotten to experience a lot of lucha that people lived through when they were younger the first time recently. That'll just be another one, eventually.

I am looking at this though, because it's a Garza singles match against an opponent I haven't seen him wrestle much. It was a really functional match and one that had a lot of rudo dominance. The former is one of my favorite things when it comes to thinking about wrestling and the latter is one of my favorite things in lucha, so this down my alley.

First, the functional bit. The match had two purposes. The first was to set up the Mistico/Garza vs Averno/Mephisto (c) tag title match over the next week. The second was to further build the hair match vs Perro, Jr, which, as they told us repeatedly, was two weeks away. Garza was losing that one, and CMLL's way, in such cases, is to build up the loser in the weeks before, both to put the outcome in question and to protect him through the loss. In this case, that meant beating Averno (and moreover, beating Averno/Mephisto for the titles). It also meant thwarting Perro, Jr's attempt to sway the match.

At the same time, it was important to protect Averno in this loss (especially as he'd be losing the following the week, tinder to the fire of building to a big house for Perro vs Garza). That leads to the second bit, the heat, the rudo dominance. Averno took most of the first two thirds of the match. That included getting an early advantage, pulling Garza up a couple of times when he was almost definitely out, and regaining the advantage almost immediately after Garza came back and took the first fall (which he did with a ton of mask pulling and a really beautiful inside-out second rope moonsault):

Averno came out with a new mask between falls, took right back over, and kept the advantage for much of the rest of the match. Garza came back though, and one ref bump later, fended off Perro, Jr.'s attack, finally hitting a picture perfect corkscrew moonsault for the win. This was good, but more than that, it was functional, and I love matches that are functional over a number of goals, with certain restrictions. This was a great roadmark on the journey to the hair match, and has me all the more excited for when I finally break down and watch it.