Well shit, I wasn't really sure what to expect from this but I thought it was a downright tremendous ol' time. I've been on a bit of a Hechicero kick lately, and while I'm generally hesitant to use cagematch as a reference for the top end stuff to watch, this jumped out as a pretty decent five and a half star affair and that one time I saw Bandido I quite liked him so to hell with it. I'll say this off the bat - this did not feel like a 37-minute match and of course I mean that in the best way possible. If I knew the thing went 37 minutes beforehand I honestly wouldn't have watched it. The youtube file was around 40 minutes, but I figured there'd be some preamble and whatever because it was an ROH World Title match on a PPV and whatever. But no, it went 37 bell to bell. I didn't actually realise it went that long until the end and there was never a point during it when I thought to check, and coming from an easily agitated man that's about as big a compliment as I can pay it. The early parts with the lucha-inspired matwork just landed on the money for me. I'd watched some mid-2010s Hechicero before going into this and I'm not sure if it's because the bulking up (shall we say) slowed him down between then and 2025, because Bandido isn't as used to working holds like this (I honestly could not say) so they slowed it down a touch, because they wanted to slow it down a little for their audience, or a combination of all three, but either way this was slower than some of the Mexico Hechicero I'd been watching. It wasn't as snappy or fluid and they never transitioned between holds as gracefully. There was maybe a sense that they were working through things they'd mapped out beforehand, if I'm being hyper-critical. Still, it was good stuff and I was engaged the whole time. Hechicero is super creative as always but I thought Bandido hung with him well. I'd only seen Bandido one other time, against Bryan Danielson on Dynamite from back in January 2023, and while I liked that match and his performance it wasn't enough for me to have a proper handle on him. He struck me as a true babyface here, one not afraid to emote and show real vulnerability and engage with the crowd, look to them for support and feed off it. The crowd respond to him as well and it felt like they were fully behind him. There was even a nice touch where Bandido paid Hechicero in kind for some earlier mask-ripping, but when the crowd didn't take all that kindly to it Bandido half turned and apologised for stooping to such a level. It was cool to see a babyface lean all the way into that, basically. The layout here was simple enough and there was really only two major transitions the whole match. The first came after the early matwork, where Bandido hit a big dive over the top and looked to be in control, only to run face-first into a flying knee that put the ball in Hechicero's court. When Hechicero starts to get too cocky and asks for Bandido to hit him, Bandido obliges and it actually leads to him taking over, which is a pretty nice bit of comeuppance. The finishing stretch was long, but it had some great build and the pacing really worked. They let the big moments sink in and they never rushed through things. Some of those big moments were huge too. The brainbuster on the guardrail was fucking wild and then Bandido ate shit on that spinning F5 thing off the apron. The big dives were BIG and even the strike exchanges had enough exhaustion behind them that they never felt rote. Even that exhaustion - whether it was selling or genuine - helped smooth over some of the more elaborate stuff towards the end being a bit sluggish in execution. When they both stood up on the top rope it looked like they might crash and burn but Bandido hitting a crazy backflip fallaway slam was a hell of a way to shut me up. That's something else Bandido was great at, putting across how much effort he had to exert to lift Hechicero for some moves or reverse certain holds. I don't think I've watched more than a dozen matches from 2025 but I'd be shocked if I watched a hundred and found five better than this.
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