[2000-10-13-CMLL] El Hijo del Santo & Blue Panther vs Negro Casas & Scorpio Jr (Relevos Incredibles)

[soup23]

CMLL is back baby. For the first time since the big August show, there is a lot of juice being ingested into the product and things are progressing. This is a Relevos match where the competitors don't really mess around with the pretense of not liking their partner. Even their regular pairings like Santo/Casas have quite a past so it isn't a stretch for them to be opposite each other here. That really helped the intensity of the match overall. Santo was a loon doing no less than three huge dives including a top con hilo onto Scorpio where he slides into the front row of chairs. Him and Scorpio were the focal point of the match and we had mask ripping and posting leading to Scorp being a bloody mess. Finish worked really well as Santo blocks a foul and then takes his own mask off but hands it to Scorpio so they get DQ'd. A clever finish done well here and hopefully leads to some more matches down the line. All four here are old enough to not have the pretense before the CMLL crowd of being a clean cut tecnico so they went out and beat the shit out of each other to my enjoyment. **** (7.9)

[ohtani's jacket]

This was the Relevos Increíbles that stemmed from all the hijinks in the Leyenda de Plata final. It was awesome for a number of reasons. First, you got to see Santo and Panther team up together like some modern-day version of Santo and Blue Demon. Then you got some absolutely amazing exchanges between Blue Panther and Negro Casas that were some of the best tag or trios exchanges of the year and totally worthy of two workers of their calibre and the expectations that come along with seeing them square off. Casas was somewhere close to his best after a fairly indifferent year. Some may say that he was never that bad just featured less than in previous years but the Wagner feud in September seems to have lit a fire under him. I particularly loved his selling of the La Tapatia (Romero Special.) And lastly, you had some awesome brawling between Santo and Scorpio as well as some of Santo's exquisite dives. Watching Santo and Scorpio beat the crap out of each other was fun. Scorpio is a made guy as far as I'm concerned. I now expect that he's going to be good in every match I see. There's been a lot of surprises in 2000 but Bestia and Scorpio being consistently great is up there.

 

The only thing I didn't like about this was the finish which didn't seem like a particularly honorable move for a tecnico least of all one of Santo's stature. It wasn't as though Scorpio had been using dirty tactics. It was a pretty clean fight as far as brawling on the outside goes. Usually, tecnicos pull those kinds of moves to give rudos their comeuppance after a foul or some other dirty tactic. It seemed out of place here. And a wrestler like Santo should never voluntarily take his mask off. Never. On the whole it was another great bit of TV, though.

[Tim Evans]

Santo was great in this. Between the dives and getting so fed up with Scorpio that he takes his own mask off. Casas finally looks motivated in his section with Panther. Scorpio bleeds a ton during the brawl with Santo. This match felt like a return of how great CMLL was earlier in the year.