CMLL star Mistico took on Matt Sydal in a singles match this past Friday night on AEW Rampage and immediately following the match, Mistico and his fellow CMLL stars issued a challenged to the Blackpool Combat Club for a match in Arena Mexico.
Jon Moxley and Claudio Castagnoli has since responded to the challenge made by the CMLL stars and seemingly accepted a possible showdown between the two factions in the legendary venue in Mexico.
Moxley said, “The luchadores of CMLL stand in solidarity against the forces of AEW and the elite of the elite, the Blackpool Combat Club.” “Things haven’t gotten too out of hand yet. War is an ugly, terrible thing. But in sport, competition, it can be beautiful. Professional wrestling, the greatest sport in the world, transcends borders and cultural barriers. The struggle in the ring, the human struggle of the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who if he fails, fails daring greatly.”
“Questions are answered in the arena. Since the time of David versus Goliath. In this case, show style is superior? Lucha Libre, national heritage, with all its idiosyncrasies, or the style of the Blackpool Combat Club? We don’t have a style. The BCC is decades and decades, a lineage of knowledge, shared, passed in, preserved, and protected. So in this story, the BCC, should we walk into Arena Mexico, be David or Goliath? The answer is, we’re both.”
Castagnoli added, “You picked a fight with this guy, my friend, Jon Moxley. You thought you just picked a fight with the biggest star in AEW.” “Prison rules, right? You go after the biggest, baddest guy you can, just to make a name for yourself. You know what? Kudos for that. What you didn’t expect is you picked a fight with me. See, my story with CMLL goes back 15,16,17 years, when I just started in the United States. I was like, you know what? Lucha Libre. Over 100 years worth of heritage. That’s what I want to learn. That’s what I want to get good at. Every week, I ordered the DVDs. Every week, I watched the shows, and I went down to Mexico for a week straight. I went to the offices of CMLL, begging for a chance. A week went by, a week and a half went by. I got rejected every single day.”
“So you know what I did? I just became the best luchador there is. Not out there in the arena, in the back. In the dark, where nobody was watching. I trained day in and day out, and now here you are, trying to show off what Lucha Libre actually is to the great audience of AEW, and you got showed up by the Blackpool Combat Club because we train when nobody’s looking, because we work when others stop. That’s what we do. Then you invite us to your house. See, we didn’t invite you to come here because this is our house, our rules. But you invite us to your house? If you do that, su casa is gonna be nosto casa.”
You can check out Moxley and Castagnoli’s comments below.
EXCLUSIVE! Tensions between #BlackpoolCombatClub & @CMLL_OFICIAL continue to escalate. @JonMoxley & @ClaudioCSRO pose the question: what would happen if #BCC come to #CMLL's house? pic.twitter.com/paU1qLbISA
— All Elite Wrestling (@AEW) February 12, 2024
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
