Two for one.
The July 11th IAW took me a while to get to because the no fans atmosphere became hard to enjoy – this is one of many problems CMLL has too – but the Tromba versus Arez versus Latigo match should be seen anyway. I’m lower on the most, the short duration makes it hard for me to rate it better than Good, but it’s still plenty worthwhile for the totally different matches this crew is doing. They seemed to go into this match with the idea of doing no moves that anyone else had done before, or at least it felt that way for the first four or so minutes. The creatively was off the charts and this might have worked as a Great match for me if they could totally hold it together. They were just a little bit off from connecting at times. The finish made sense in that they were all going for their big moves, but it still felt way too short. I wonder if this is an actual result of it being a no-fans show if they would’ve been afraid of a negative reaction for the brief main event if there were ticket-buying people.
The women’s match on a typical Mexican indie show typically gets no more booking attention than “ok, just let the women have a match”, which occasionally is good news. There’s no wild booking to get in the way of the high effort match between Lady Cat, Star Fire, Lilith Dark, and Miss Delicious. There still is a superfluous double pin, but they work at a fast pace over a short time length. The main event is obviously better, but this still fits in the same Good level. It’s a little bit too indie cliché when the got to the four-way chop spot but otherwise good action for eight minutes. Everyone besides Star Fire has been part of the improved IWRG’s women’s division before the break; it’s too bad that concept seems to have been downplayed since their restart
The wild booking does kick in the Jitsu & Energia three falls match, which turns into a tag match, which turns into partners turning on each other. Just, no. Kunay versus Heroe Romero was a better use of creativity and another Good match; maybe Kunay’s niche is just finding weird spots to do in a falls count anywhere situation. The fight improved the moment they stopped doing a normal match and started climbing on carefully positioned people to do headscissors. Hera & La Fuerza vs Ciclón Infernal & Slyfer was a bit too long and not remarkable.
The August 10th show is back in front of people at Gimnasio Mitklan. I watched the Estrellas del Ring version. I can not name the IAW commentators, I do not recall anything they said on the previous show, but I did miss them greatly when I was trying to figure out who people were in the undercard. The tradeoff is the undercard isn’t much good. The women’s tag match falls apart at points, the five-way is all offense with no particular direction, and this was another in a long line of Mexican indie royal rumbles where too many people stick around for too long. The highlight of the Rumble was seeing Santy Hernandez involved, assuming a 100% chance he was going to do a WWE bit, and then watching him hide outside of the ring until Kunay thought he won in a WWE bit. He is that dude.
Baby Love versus Star Fire versus Candy Swing is not memorable, but it was successful in having a goal (Baby Love heroically overcoming the odds against bigger opponents) and achieving that goal. It was in this match that it clicked that she’s a blond thin masked woman from Monterrey with a generic name and some popularity; hopefully this goes better than the last one. (She absolutely should change her name as soon as possible, before it becomes harder to do so. She’s only going to go so far as “Baby Love”.)
Jitsu vs Yoruba vs Mr. Leo vs Ciclón Infernal was back to just having a lot of moves and nothing much coming from them. The referee screwing up the count (in the second straight match) didn’t help, but having so many multi-people matches really doesn’t help. I know it’s not actually true, but it feels like Jitsu is the only person in Mexico working more after the pandemic started than before it; I can’t escape him right now.
Ares vs Aramis vs Willy Banderas had some ups and downs. Willy had trouble either with the rhythm the other two are used to working or remembering the complicated spots. There were few problems when it was a one versus one match, but the hit rate went down whenever all three people were involved. It’s useful to prevent Aramis & Arez from facing each other and their same crew forever and they’ve got to make what they do work with outsiders to continue growing, but this just made Banderas look not up to their level. I liked this enough that it was still Good, though even just the Guadalajara guy against either one of these guys might have been better
The Latigo vs Aeroboy match didn’t go for any big innovation, it was just a really well done title match. (I rated it Great.) There were a few spots that were particularly entertaining, like the well done rolling casita spot. This was more a match building very strongly to the end, getting the crowd very excited for the last few minutes. It’s an obvious advantage to have an actual group of people making noise for a match, and I was with them. They probably could’ve gotten in one more comeback after the big near fall, but that seemed like a minor complaint.