El Hijo del Santo vs. Negro Casas, mask vs. hair, 9/19/97

I've never liked this match. I was hoping that watching CMLL TV of the Santo vs. Casas brothers feud would reveal exactly what's great about it, but it remains a mystery.

I have no idea what they were trying to do in this match. Portions of the match are kinda like shoot-style -- a junior heavyweight approximation of shoot-style, really, like BattlARTS -- but lucha has no counts for rope breaks or downs, so most of the match is worked in the ropes. This is meant to imply a brawl, since they stay tied up in the ropes a lot... The ref can't get a clean break & it spills outside at times... but as a blowoff to a feud it's pretty damn listless. Lucha has a great tradition of brawling, and an even greater tradition of brawling in wager matches & this was a pretty fucking epic wager. Again, I have no idea what they were thinking. Casas simply doesn't have the offence to work "shoot style." And he can't sell it, either. It's kinda cool when Santo comes out of the ropes with a strike, but he's never gonna stiff him, Casas drops to the mat to do his face down, death selling & there's no count, naturally. That sounds like the criticism of someone who's never watched lucha before, but this was a crappy hybrid style & not lucha.

Even as a fight, Santo completely owns Casas in this. At no point does Santo ever look like losing. It may be the lack of three falls, but I saw a shitty Casas/Bestia Salvaje hair match where Casas sold death for two falls only to mount a comeback based around some crappy missile dropkick offence. I dig a lot of things about this era of CMLL but Casas' technico singles match run isn't one of them.

I'm generally of the opinion that you have to take a match for what it is, not what it could've been or should've been,.. Yet this was disappointing in the context of what they'd done up until then. I'd rather watch the most predictable Santo/Casas match imaginable than this. Which puts me in a camp of one. But there you go.