Eddie isn't my favourite Angle opponent and Angle certainly isn't my favourite Eddie opponent, but I always thought they were a good pairing and worked well together. They'd usually incorporate some decent matwork in their matches and the opening 6-7 minutes of this is still really good stuff. We often talk about how Angle, for a legitimate Olympic-level wrestler, never really worked THE MAT~ in WWE. Whether that was a restriction imposed by the house style or one imposed by Angle's philosophy towards working doesn't really matter 20 years later -- he was a world-class amateur wrestler who never incorporated much of it in his professional wrestling. Along kind of similar lines Eddie Guerrero is a guy who cut his teeth wrestling folks like Blue Panther, El Hijo del Santo and Negro Casas. We have a match with him and those three guys where Eddie is 22 year old and they're all working incredible mat exchanges. So it's a shame we never really got to see Eddie stretch out on the mat more as well. The grappling here was all relatively simple stuff, but it was worked with great intensity and had that attention to detail that really makes a matwork segment pop. Even something like the way Angle practically nipped up out of a headlock before immediately grabbing an armbar made him look like a pit bull. I thought they teased and threaded their signature stuff into this really smartly, obviously making a point of not blowing through everything they had in their first match of the series. During the matwork section they came up for air at one point and Eddie tried for the Three Amigos, hit one before it was reversed into a triple German attempt, but Angle could only hit one of those before Eddie cut him off. Angle tried to hit the top rope Angle Slam midway through, Eddie shoved him off, then tried to capitalise with the frog splash only for Angle to move. That Angle never managed to hit even a regular Angle Slam - the first was countered with an armdrag, then Eddie turned the second into a DDT - was another thing they left on the table for future matches. The one finisher kickout was from the frog splash and it felt appropriately big, so the match certainly never suffered from Kurt Angle main event bloat. I've always really liked the finish and if you're going to go with one like that rather than a decisive clean one then at least make it creative. This was definitely that and further adds to the idea that Eddie can and will use every trick imaginable to win.
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