2016 Round-up Day 4

Volador Jr. vs. Cavernario, NWA World Historic Welterweight Championship, CMLL 10/7/16

Well, it was obvious watching this that CMLL title matches are no longer mat-based classics but generic singles matches, and that lucha is more influenced by outside influences than ever before. That said, I still enjoyed this.

What I liked about it was that the rudo, Cavernario, had the momentum for most of the bout. and the tecnico, Volador Jr, had to keep fighting back even after he'd squared things up. Not only were the dives crazy, it also felt like they were right on cue. There's nothing quite as pretty in lucha as a dive that happens exactly when it ought to. You're into the flow of the match, the timing is right for the dive, and off they go. Of course, it helps that Cavernario is mental. He takes some of the nuttiest bumps in the history of lucha. It's like Psicosis turned up to 11.

I don't watch a lot of Volador Jr., so I found a lot of his offense novel. I could see how it would wear thin if he does it in every match, and I wasn't sure how much of it was the way Cavernario took the bump, but that sunset flip thing he does where it looks like he piledrives the guy was a hell of a punctuation mark to end a fall.

The shit they did on the set sucked, but that's one of those things where as soon as one guy does it, everybody has to do it, and they're constantly having to up the ante. It seemed WWE influenced to me. There was nothing authentically "lucha" about it, but they wiped the bad taste of my mouth pretty quickly, and overall I have mostly positive things to say about this.