An unreal Casas performance. A lot of times I'll see matches between some of my favourite wrestlers from Mexico and my favourite wrestlers from Japan and I'll be less excited than I should be, just because stylistically they'll meet somewhere in the middle and maybe rein themselves in a little for the occasion. Sometimes there's just a styles clash and it doesn't really work in practice like you'd think it would on paper. I've seen Casas work New Japan where, for obvious reasons, he's not the Negro Casas you'd see in front of an Arena Mexico crowd who knows him inside out. You get 80% of Casas and 80% Casas is still great, but you know what 100% Casas looks like and why wouldn't you want that. I wondered if Sasuke would roll into Mexico City and scale back some of his wilder tendencies. I probably shouldn't have because he did not scale anything back and pretty much fit like a glove, working in front of this crowd like he would've in Korakuen Hall or any Michinoku Pro gymnasium. Stylistically the primera caida was closer to the sort of grappling you'd see in Japan than Mexico, but it was plenty rugged and Sasuke never pissed about sitting in holds just to be doing it. Whenever he had Casas grounded it looked like he was trying to finish him, really yanking on armbars and leaving Casas scrambling to the ropes, each time with a little more desperation. He more or less dominated that first fall and it set the table for Casas' response in the next two. His response of course was to be the biggest shithouse conman bastard imaginable. He knew he was up against it going into the segunda and straight away he dipped into his bag of horse shit, crying to the ref' about Sasuke's chinlocks being chokes, coughing and spluttering and pointing to his throat. The ref' starts to come around to the idea that maybe he really is being choked, Casas being a world class thespian and all that. As you can imagine, Sasuke gets more and more irritated that the ref's actually buying this. Sasuke is being seconded by Tiger Mask on the night so Casas hangs out the ropes over by that corner, whipping his head back and flying across the ring as if he's just been struck. Tiger Mask is FLUMMOXED and pleads innocence, but Casas does it again while the ref' checks on Sasuke and this time he slaps himself for the audial effect! Casas runs the ropes and trips himself into a face-first bump, Tiger Mask immediately backing away with his hands up. Then as the ref' goes to have a word Casas thumps Sasuke in the balls. As far as setups and payoffs go it was pretty much perfect and maybe the best low blow ever. Sasuke kicking out of TWO fouls was ludicrous but Casas did make him pay for it in the tercera with some brutal work on the leg, including dropping him into the fixed seats and repeatedly kicking one of those seats closed on Sasuke's knee. You make peace with Sasuke blowing off that leg work because you already knew he would anyway and also because his lunatic dives might play even better in Mexico than they do in Japan. This Arena Coliseo crowd isn't as attuned to Sasuke's madness so people don't clear out the way instantly. It means you get moments like Casas being dropkicked off the corner to the floor and almost killing a photographer and Sasuke flying outside with his Asai moonsault or crazy tiger kick, the ring close enough to the first row where you expect a spectator to be caught in the crossfire. How Sasuke never overshot the moonsault and put the toe of his boots through someone's face I'll never know. One of my favourite Casas spots is him going up top and getting unreasonably ahead of himself before missing whatever move he's about to hit, but this time it actually connected and it looked like Sasuke's lungs got popped like balloons. His cockiness still nearly costs him as Sasuke has been in enough car crashes before where you know he'll come back from anything, but Casas rights the ship in the end with a gorgeous, rapid fast casita. Casas was a phenomenon in this, a force of nature if you want to get all purple about it, as charismatic as any wrestler to ever live who took an already very good wrestler and wrestled them to a level nobody else could. The best to ever do it, doing it at a point where he might never have been better.
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