I don't watch a lot of lucha. It's not that I don't find it entertaining, I just don't really go out of my way to see it. Having watched the Dragon Lee/Kamaitachi feud from last year (extending into this year), I wanted to check out Kamaitachi's hair vs. hair match with Maximo. Right out of the gate, Kamaitachi just starts destroying Maximo's knee, playing to the crowd while Maximo is suffering on the mat. Kamaitachi utilizes his double knee drop to further cripple Maximo before submitting him early with a modified leglock. But what's great about Kamaitachi is that he doesn't waste a lot of time going right back to the bad knee during the second round. At one point, he just drags and drops Maximo right out of the ring. Maximo does a great job expressing pain -- stumbling around, limping, with a look of 'fuck'. See, this is where Kenny Omega takes this believability in selling a limb with great facials and hindered movement and dials it up to 11. Maximo scores the second fall after a springboard armdrag into a single leg crab (all day) for the submission. The third fall is all about dives and dropkicks, and Kamaitachi abandons his strategy of stretching the bum knee on the mat and uses the weight of his dives to collapse Maximo. There's a great spot where Kamaitachi is clutching at Maximo's hair and Maximo slaps his hand away and finally whips him in the face with his hair. There were some shenanigans in the end but honestly, for this type of match, with these two guys, it didn't really disrupt the flow of things and it wasn't too long-winded. Maximo wins with a pop-up Liger Bomb. Again, a simple story being told in the ring where Kamaitachi's crazy high-impact offense is a little more subdued and targeted at putting constant stress on Maximo's bad knee. Maximo does a great job of selling his pain in a believable manner, and it doesn't magically disappear but carries on through the duration of the match. Awesome stuff!
No comments:
Post a Comment