Here's a phrase I use a lot when I watch Darby against someone I've never seen him matched up against before: "of course this could ONLY be awesome." I say that so often because I want to watch Darby against pretty much anybody anyway, but Rush? Man c'mon. How could this be anything other than awesome? There was a point in time, about 12-13 years ago now, where Rush was my favourite wrestler in the world. I was following CMLL weekly and he and Casas were trying to kill each other nearly every show. Then I stopped following CMLL weekly. I haven't really followed any wrestling weekly since then, I guess until the last few weeks with AEW, and in the last 10 years I've probably only seen half a dozen Rush matches. I can tell you this, though - he is still now what he was then. Hardly anybody works with the sort of unhinged intensity as Rush. They call him El Toro Blanco and he works exactly like it. As Schiavone says, you mess with the bull, you get the horns. Darby never even needed to mess with the bull here, Rush just charged him at the start and chucked Darby off the turnbuckles to the floor. The match hadn't even started but the horns were out. There were points where Rush was a walking, raving, roid-raged madman, pacing around ready to fight with anything in front of him. The yoots might call it AURA or some such, but Rush had an air of menace about him that was best avoided. He almost reminded me of late 90s Scott Steiner where he'd just do whatever he wanted during matches, sometimes fully and blatantly booting someone in the balls in front of the referee, and nobody had it in them to do anything about it. What are you gonna do, tell him not to do that? And then what? This was that and when Rush grabbed Taz's water bottle and poured the whole thing over himself I loved how Taz was like yeah sure go for it. Nobody wanted the horns and they were happy to let Darby have them. And obviously Darby was an amazing foil for all of it. He got whipped into the steps outside the ring and his flip bump that about smashed his calves off the barricade was nuts. His first tope attempt hit nothing but the base of the announce table and it landed him with a cut forehead, which Rush sunk his teeth into both literally and figuratively. When he tried to go blow for blow with Rush he got wrecked, one slap to the face sounding like a fucking gunshot. The comeback would need to be fast and sudden and as usual he'd need to take a risk. His first opening came when Rush started lounging in the middle of the ring, Darby sprinting out the corner to jump on him and rain punches. The second tope landed and it was Rush who got clattered into the table this time, then Darby followed up with a missile dropkick while Rush sat dazed in a chair. They had to be clever with the finish because Darby had spent about 85% of the match getting assaulted, and even at the best of times it's hard to have someone like Rush lose convincingly and make it plausible. I thought the way they did it was great, with Rush charging across the ring with the corner dropkick, Darby avoiding it and using his smarts to roll him up. Every Darby match is like watching him solve a puzzle in real time. Usually the puzzle is figuring out how to use his own body as a weapon without breaking that weapon in the process. His opponent is a door and Darby's the battering ram. This time he picked the lock instead, and the look Rush gave him afterwards makes me hope they get to do this again at some point soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment