[2000-04-28-IWC SoCal] Los Gringos (Ricky Reyes & Rocky Romero) vs Eric Matlock & Devin Willis vs Sun Warrior & Red Tornado

[GSR]

I’m assuming then that it must’ve been Matlock & Willis who jumped these two teams at the end of last week’s match then? Where do I even begin with this cluster of epic proportions? Fortunately I have no idea who is Eric Matlock and who is Devin Willis (to go along with still being unable to tell Ricky Reyes and Rocky Romero apart) which is probably saving me a thousand words at least with how I write these things up! They work this three way with three men in the ring at once, however because these guys are so inexperienced you’re left with one man literally standing there and doing nothing on several occasions. The inexperience shows in the amount of blown spots that we get in the opening stretch; Warrior botches an around the world Lucha arm drag slipping off his man, you’ll see the worst ever attempt at the Tajiri handspring elbow, one of the Gringos and Warrior mess up an Irish whip and even a simple double hip toss spot is too much for these to crisply execute at this point! In between this you have a never ending cycle of pinfalls being broken up which, considering this is elimination rules, makes little sense and is a personal pet peeve of mine. At one point Willis (I think) is stood on the top turnbuckle for twenty seconds seemingly waiting for Warrior to get into position, he doesn’t, so just jumps anyway and leg drops the mat! Guys are just coming and going as they please now, not even bothering to tag their partner at times. Despite this there are some good morsels hidden away in there. The Gringos have a cool double Japanese arm drag, and the one of them hits the same lightning fast Northern Lights suplex as he did last week. They also have a double team top rope dropkick (that really should be their finisher) where Tornado is sat on the shoulders of one of the Gringos and the other levels him with a missile dropkick. While I found the sheer number of blown spots and botches funny, there is one scary moment where Tornado’s top rope rana is supposed to be countered with a powerbomb, but one of the Gringos loses him and takes an awful looking bump that could easily have broken his neck. The crowd are clearly losing patience, for after Willis blows yet another move (a springboard after draping Tornado over the top rope) the fans start laughing at him. Twenty minutes in and the wrestlers are notably gassed. Thankfully we get our first elimination courtesy of a double team side slam/guillotine leg drop by the Gringos on Eric Matlock. The action becomes more palatable and far less chaotic now that it’s a regulation tag match, however my interest has long since waned. Sun Warrior picks up the win for his team after a victory roll in a bout that goes over half an hour. There is some post-match angle where it looks like the Gringos split up (one of them wants to get out of there while the other is more interested in putting a post-match beating on the opposition) but the footage ends before it fully plays out. Not recommended in the slightest and only saved from bottom spot in my list due to the number of Indy stinkers that we’ve already had this month!