Matt D

What's Rocky up to?

Time to hotshot Cena back onto TV.

It's amazing how different the voting is by category

I guess we can take some small joy that he'll skin rabbits on his official WON HOF plaque to keep the blood off the table.

Given it was me, that's not an unfair thought.

Now I want to start hiding things around the board in anagrams. Should I go with A Bad Revving or Her Screwball Luck as my top big man?

I sort of admit that three years and another six or seven hundred matches down the line I might be completely sick and fed up of the CMLL house style. I'm still enjoying it for the most part so long as there are a few guys in a match that I like. Unlike someone like Cubs, I don't watch everything either. I'm pretty choosy and I have years and years and years of footage to choose from currently, on top of the new stuff.

Way to take one for the team there Pete.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzKMa9zvx4rQn7-TPewu6zQ/videos A few years of midsouth TV already.

One thing that can't be discounted is that nearly the same pairings work the same crowd week after week after week. I'm so deep down this rabbit hole now that I thoroughly enjoy looking for the variations and seeing how a trio might decide to work a match one week to the next and why. If you have a similar pairing, they absolutely won't work the same trios match two weeks in a row. They might, however, work something very similar in two different arenas over the same week or two (but that's interesting as well). I do think that different wrestlers work within the rigidity differently and that's what makes it all so interesting. I'm often looking for little character moments and every match, good or bad, will have more than a few.

Hey, is that Alabama match you mentioned on youtube?

Grey vs Keith Haward - 20 mins, no rounds. Haward made for a very good base for Grey, with a 1.5 stone advantage. He mained tried to ground him and contain him and that let Grey show off. There were some call-backs and build towards moves (three attempts for the surfboard, Grey evening the falls by countering the move that Haward used to win the first one) that I liked quite a bit, and Grey accounted for himself well, constantly countering without it being overbearing. This was solid.

Fantastics vs Mantell/Pritchard Super fun shine. Hugely entertaining. It went too long but the heat, relatively stilted as it was, still was good enough to make you feel like it was longer. Hot tag seemed earned but a little below potential, but you got the sense that the Fantastics realized that timing-wise and did their best to maximize it, which I give credit for. Finish was spirited but not exactly worldshaking. Still, very good stuff. Mantell and Pritchard put on a great performance getting clowned and the Fantastics were extremly good at what they did, from interacting with the crowd before the match to the last seconds.

Alright, let's give this a go. Context matters. In fact, the exact criticism I have for Hansen is something I praise Eadie for in 1988, where the babyface inmates were running the crappy match asylum. Even then, while he really made said babyfaces work for anything they could get during the shine, it was still very much a shine and when it was time to give on the comeback, he gave in a huge way. Hansen never gave so much as other people were able to increasingly take from him (in an environment where some more giving would have been lovely in general) and I think the give and take is important in wrestling. With lucha, it's the ebb and flow. Tension or pressure is how I like to describe it (as I did above), where I like the gauge to build and build until the crowd and the viewer is ready to explode. You can use the Jake metaphor but it's not quite the same. Instead of teasing and teasing a comeback and cutting off, it's more like an increasingly loud hum, where the amount of violence (in total) constantly ticks up and the rudos get more arrogant and dickish, more rudo you could say, and that leads to glorious and often poetic, if temporary, comeuppance, when that mandate of heaven DOES shift and the tecnicos come back. Someone tell me if any of that makes sense.

The Hansen criticism is not because I want a ten minute shine. I will elaborate in a little while.

Emotionally, I often lean towards getting the beatdown started early. I understand that the matwork and the early exchanges are the whole appeal to many people and much of where the mastery is, but for me much of the appeal of lucha is the visceral moment of the comeback, and the raising of tension to make that moment sing. That's kind of what I meant about Sangre Chicana vs MS-1 being a bit of a skeleton key. Almost every lucha trios has that to some degree, but the balance is different, and I much prefer matches where the meat is in the beatdown. That's true with most of us here and Southern Tags too though, I think. I know I took flack for loving all of the early Ingobernables trios last year where they ambushed and started with a beatdown week after week while everyone was going nuts over the Busca spotfests instead.

Alright, I have a lot to say, and some of this I've been meaning to get put down somewhere for a while. I had a hard time with lucha. I had enjoyed the process of the AWA 80s set so much that I wanted to get right on board with lucha even though I was extremely unfamiliar with it, and I struggled through the first few discs on the set. By the time I hit disc 5, I started to feel like I had a little sense of what I was watching, enough so that I wanted to spin off and start writing things up for Segunda Caida. The #1 rule I had, however, was not to just jump to the best stuff. Why watch the best stuff before you have an understanding of what you're watching? When you do that, you don't have an accurate baseline, or your baseline becomes MS-1 vs Sangre Chicana. I wanted to watch a number of different situations from a number of different years, and I tried to avoid singles matches until I understood more of what built up to them. And Parv, I did exactly what you'd do in this situation. I watched matches, I took notes, and I started to look for patterns. In doing so, I figured out some things about at least the CMLL style of lucha. (And even then I admit that I lose some context with my language gaps, but you can learn a lot, in general, from how the matches are worked). Let's start with this. Here's what you don't need to know about lucha. In trios matches, there are captains. To win a fall, either the captain has to get pinned/submitted or the other two members of the team have to. If someone is knocked out of the ring or dives out, a partner can replace him. Babyfaces are tecnicos. Heels are Rudos. It's not exactly a 1 to 1 correlation. A backbreaker is called a quebradora. A tope con giro is some sort of flippy spinny dive thing. The first fall is the primera. The second fall is the segunda. The third fall is the tercera. That's what someone does not need to know about lucha. Why? Because you know that stuff already and it doesn't really matter all that much. Mike Tenay told us all that years ago as if it was all that mattered. It's not important on a real narrative level and you know it anyway. Here's what you need to know about trios matches. Trios matches have a point. Almost everything done in a trios match has a purpose. Almost every trios match has an internal narrative, some central theme that it's pushing forward. Usually that's a feud between two wrestlers, though CMLL's booking or lack there of means not always. Sometimes they're the captains, sometimes they're not. All of the wrestlers are generally paired up against each other in the beginning, though those pairings can shift. The match will almost always end with a refocusing towards the key pairing. That's what late match dives are for, by the way. Dives, in trios terceras, are generally to clear the ring and set up the last exchange between the key players, to put the exclamation point on the match. The dives aren't the end. They're a means to the end. This actually inverts the standard southern tag formula which usually ends with a hot tag and everyone in the ring as things break down. Then in the unfocused chaos, either the babyfaces triumph or the heels do something underhanded to win. Lucha trios matches are generally the opposite of that with things becoming refocused after a fairly chaotic tercera. That brings things back to structure. This style is about build and payoff. The tercera, as I just mentioned, is about a build to the dives and that last exchange. In a lot of ways, the rest of the match is the build to the tercera. There are only a few ways these matches are generally structured and once you understand these patterns, understanding lucha becomes a lot easier. A ) The tecnicos and the rudos start out the match in a feeling out process with pairings, matwork, and fast exchanges. The tecnicos have a general advantage. Eventually, the rudos have enough and opportunistically swarm the ring starting the beatdown. Or the tecnicos can win the first fall and that swarming starts in the segunda. Or B )The rudos ambush the tecnicos from the get go and immediately start the beatdown. That's pretty much it. The beatdown is your heat and works one of two ways. Either A ) all of the rudos are in the ring at once and they churn through the tecnicos using a numbers game, with the tecnicos cycling in. Rarely do you have it so that the tecnicos are shown to be all recovered at once. They won't be waiting on the apron but instead they'll convalesce on the floor (Volador had a match this last weekend where he was hanging out on the apron for way too long during his partner getting beat down 2 on 1 and it drove me nuts because you never see it). The more over tecnicos will know to fight back a bit but ultimately keep getting overwhelmed. Or B ) after taking the advantage, one rudo stays in the ring for the most part, beating on one tecnico. So long as this happens, they can play more face-in-peril style. The rudos will cycle in and occasionally, after a long beating, a tecnico might roll out and another will take the heat. These matches are about broad momentum shifts. They are about the mandate of heaven shifting. So whether the rudos started the beatdown in the primera or the segunda, generally in the subsequent fall, the tecnicos will come back. This is usually due to the rudos going to a well once too often, getting too cocky, or through basic miscommunication. Often times, it'll be through one tecnico dodging or reversing a move in the ring and the other two flying in, or brawling on the outside, and will often involve a revenge spot, whether that is a posting or mask ripping or whatever, some quick shine, and then a tying up of the falls (unless the tecnicos were already ahead, in which case move on to the next paragraph). This usually leads to a reset where everyone pairs off again, one at a time. This involves a lot of quick, logical cut offs, a chance for everyone to show off their offense, and usually some more tecnico shine as they fight against the odds. All of that builds back to the dives and then to the finish, usually between the two luchadores most focused, and with some ending that will bridge to whatever (usually similar) match they are running the next week, and occasionally to an eventual singles match. That's not every trios match, but if you come in with that framework, that model, as a tool for understanding what you're seeing, to see how it fits and how it matches and what the variation is, then it's much harder to get lost. You can do the same thing with wager matches or title matches.

Trying to figure out those motives again. I'll try to write something about the journey tomorrow.

I've done such a bad job of writing up what I've been watching. Last night was Steve Grey vs John Naylor. It was the semi finals of a tournament, one fall. This was my first time seeing Naylor and I came out impressed (which could be a testament to Grey because I know OJ really doesn't like him). He had the weight advantage. I'm still getting a grip on the style, really, but there such a sense of struggle and gamesmanship. Here, Naylor had the strength and weight advantage, but was still quick and savvy. Grey spent a lot of the match battling from beneath, early on due to some legwork off of a half crab (And they made something as simple as a crab really matter in their multiple attempts at it during the match). There were a few "hanging onto the arm" exchanges that were just spectacular, and I liked the escalation towards the finish that stemmed from Grey getting slightly more desperate as things went on, allowing Naylor to capitalize. I never know how much I'm superimposing over these matches, but to me, there is a sense of circling with the rounds system, of a forward momentum that sort of ebbs and flows on the way to its ultimate destination. The whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.

First to the post on this one and I think it's very, very good. Inventive shine. Goliath and Moreno both held their own (being guys we hadn't seen as much so I wasn't sure). Then, they managed the sort of stuttering heat that the Guerreros liked to do but with weightier face in peril sections that had very little mid-match shine between them which made it feel like the babyfaces were just more damaged than the heels. Multiple hot tags or at least momentum shifts. I really liked it.

MS-1 vs Sangre Chicana IS exceptional, but it's also the skeleton key that unlocks almost all more traditional lucha.

Every match on there is tagged by wrestler.

I've written up around 230 lucha matches on SC. Not sure if that would help or hurt at this stage.

Will: Luke Harper Hater.