Phil Schneider

Possible Gancarski socko?

I am coming home from my honeymoon that afternoon. I am not sure I can pull off heading straight to Philly, but man fuck there hasn't been a live card I wanted to go to in years. LA PARK v. Wagner, Cassandro, Navarro and Solar.

What is the card?

I tried to C+P one of my FUTEN reviews but got an IPS error

Pretty much the wrestling version of Hagler v. Hearns round 1. The bell rings and Ikeda runs right into an Ono right hand and it goes from there. The story of this match is that Ono is the lower ranked member of their tag team (Apparently called Team Taco, Japan is weird) and he is going to throw the kitchen sink to take out Ikeda. Ono is a buzzsaw, throwing vicious punches in bunches square into Ikeda face and body. Ikeda absorbs these shots and fires back with big punches and kicks of his own. The finish is amazing wrestling, they both quickly counte multiple submission attempts, with Ono slipping out and landing a hellacious knee to the back of Ikeda's head, I expected cerebral fluid to fly out of his nostrils. Ono gets mount and starts pounding out Ikeda but gets caught in an awesome armbar from the bottom and is forced to tap. The best under five minute match I have ever seen, even though it was short it was a complete satisfying. Everything I love about FUTEN in one intense blast, the wrestling equivalent of a Bad Brains song.

This really felt like a classic lucha trios match building to a big singles match. The match they were setting up was TAJIRI v. Finlay although this could have easily set up Finlay v. Fujiwara or Finlay v. Ohara as Finlay gets awesome sections with all three. Finlay has said that an early 80's match with Fujiwara is one of his favorites, and three decades later we get a glance of what that might have looked like, and it was awesome. I loved Finlay bullying Fujiwara into the corner and cheap shotting him, just to see Fujiwara fire back with this great "not in my house motherfucker" look on his face. Finlay pummeling Ohara to get under TAJIRI's skin was great, as was Finlay's interactions with TAJIRI. I don't really think of TAJIRI as a matworker, but he hit the mat hard here. The turks were mainly there as window dressing, although TAJIRI's berserker chopping down of Big Boy was one of the cooler finishes of the last half a decade. Great stuff, and one of the better matches of the year

No Panther v. Casas?

Some examples, I really don't want to read a Scott Keith recap but wouldn't mind some racism to smirk at.

I love Johnathan Abrams Basketball profiles. Some of the best sports writing around

Big segunda caida revamp in 2014

How can they discuss it if they haven't seen it? It's your site, so you can shill as much as you want, just I don't think the timing was appropriate. You of all people are going to complain about shilling? You make 20 posts a week at DVDVR linking to your blog,

Everyone knows Lawler is a notoriously slow starter

Maybe Ian Rotten

I think Race's best career match is with Lawler. Lawler was the way better guy in it too

I loved this. Wilikins was such a violent bastard,very Fuchi or Finlayish, as he just twisting Lightning Kid into knots and pummeled him with headbutts and forearms. Waltman had some awesome moments of firing back too, really timed his hope moments great. Can't believe he was a heel coming into this match as his babyface performance was off the charts. Nifty discovery.

Fujiwara armbar is my favorite. I once won a fight in junior high by slapping it on.

You realize Negro Casas v Rush might happen next month?

I remember really digging this Daga v. Suicida match I saw live on a IWL PPV, might have been overating it with the novelty of watching a live Lucha IPPV, I also liked some of his IWRG undercard stuff. I could easily see your point, he is part of the current tape watching luchadore class, and that doesn't match up at all with what I want in lucha libre (or any wrestling for that matter), haven't seen any AAA Daga and I could see that atmosphere encouraging his worst tendencies.

That match is so fucking good

Perro Aguayo vs. Sangre Chicana, 3/20/92 I normally hate heel ref lucha matches, but this was too much fun to ignore. Any time Chicana and Perro locked up it was brawly awesomeness, but the bullshit was great too. Konan was losing his shit at ringside and was a great second and Chicana and Fiera were marvelous bastards. When they were smashing Perro's head into the turnbuckle it looked like they were trying to extract coconut water. Probably the best heel ref focused lucha match I have ever seen.

OK do a Great Lucha write up of that six man

I'll watch it tonight. I demand a long great lucha blog post about it

Man is this a total blast. Just a wild crazy brawl between six really over charismatic crazy guys. Aguyao v. Chicana is like the Lawler v. Dundee of lucha, you always want to see those guys tear after each other, Chicana had this wild half concussed selling where he took these cool lose his balance bumps, including a neat one off the apron. This was also by far the best Konan performance I have seen. He actually looked like a competent professional wrestling, brawling looked good, bumped well, hit all of his stuff. This isn't the kind of thing which people might seek out on paper, especially back in the early days of internet fandom, when all of these guys were shit on by Meltzer and Bob Barnett, but this was awesome and right up there with the better trios brawls on the 80s set.