[1992-12-19-CWA] Jushin Liger vs Franz Schumann

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Hard to really give European footage the credit and focus it deserves when there's just not a lot of 90s footage available to put on these things, because everything else is being watched in context, and this is more novel. So there were things I liked about it, but in order to properly rank it, I think I'd need to know more about what else was happening in Europe throughout the year. It's Liger, so of course there are enjoyable things, and it's cool to see him a different environment. But it's hard for me to really say what I think beyond that.

[Tim Evans]

I thought this was awesome. Never heard of the Franz guy but he looks like a guy that would have been great in UWFI or one of those "shoot" promotions. The match was some nice matwork and Liger brought the flying. Just a fun match.

[shoe]

This was pretty fun. I liked it a lot on the mat.

[FLIK]

Wasn't feeling the matwork in this one too much myself. It was good but nothing mind blowing, thought things got much better in the 2nd half when it was all about the big moves. Interesting to see them plug high end more modern style action into the more traditional Euro round format.

 

As a comparison I thought the Owen Hart vs Dann Collins match from 91 I watched a month or so back smoked this but that felt more like a modern match that happened to have rounds then an old school match being done with updated moves if that makes sense.

[PeteF3]

Schumann seems like a lost worker--he came after the era of televised European wrestling and before the era of maybe landing an undercard cruiserweight spot in WCW. I think he worked a Top of the Super Junior tournament but that was it as far as Japan. He's looked really good in the tag match and this, and I thought this was pretty great overall. You could have maybe asked for more pure matwork, but some of the takedown sequences they worked looked very nice. And of course Liger is familiar with this style and knows how to pace things through a round system. These Austro-German crowds normally come off as very provincial so it was cool to see such a pro-Liger crowd here.

[WingedEagle]

This wasn't bad, but different from just about anything else going on at the time. Liger predictable looked good, working in some nice arm drags and mat work before breaking out some spots in subsequent rounds, but it was kind of tough to get into this.

 

**3/4

[Robert S]

Call me crazy but that was one of may favorite matches on this set. Must be a genetic thing. While Schumann definitely held his one Liger is so great in this. He was a guy who really could do everything. Sometimes I wonder if his body of work would be even greater if he spent his peak years doing a different style than the NJ junior heavyweight thing.

A funny thing was the crowd chanting "Zugabe!" (means asking for an encore) after high-spots, a bit like the "this is awesome" chants.

[garretta]

Liger looked good here, as we all knew he would. This was my first chance to see Schumann, and he wasn't a bad wrestler himself. He was very quick and athletic, and he knew how to pace his offense to fit the round system, although he ended up getting the Fujiwara armbar on Liger twice as the whistle sounded to end a round.

 

Liger definitely showed that he could work a mat-based style for more than a few token minutes, and he was also a bit more aggressive with kicks and such. There wasn't much sustained body part work, but how much sense would that really make in a system with rest periods built in to allow wrestlers to shake off the effects of such work, at least to some degree?

 

One thing I noticed was that with the stricter ten-counts, wrestlers don't go for as many covers, preferring to make their opponent spend more energy by trying to get up off the canvas. It's an effective suspense-building technique, made all the more so by the dramatic count being tolled over the PA system. The announcer counts normally through about six, then his voice rises in anticipation of the possible knockout. Can you imagine what guys like Howard Finkel or Gary Cappetta could have done with counts like this here in the States? I wish we'd had a rounds-system match in the WWF or WCW so we could see for ourselves.

 

Loss was right about the lack of context making these matches more difficult to rate, but as one-off curiosities put here so we can see guys like Liger and Eddie Gilbert in a completely different environment than the one we're used to seeing them in, these bouts work just fine.