This week’s edition of NXT mostly served to fill out the midcard portion of the upcoming NXT TakeOver: Orlando. As the supporting cast at Full Sail University began to pair off with their big show dance partners, one NXT Superstar made his best case yet for main event stardom. Andrade “Cien” Almas, a wrestler whose first inauspicious month on the WWE Network seemed almost too much to overcome, displayed his incredible potential and hunger against Oney Lorcan, earning the former La Sombra this week’s #NXTMVP honors.
Cien’s transformation from the worst conceivable babyface in June to a highly effective heel by March has been one of the best-kept secrets of the WWE Universe. His first televised appearance against Tye Dillinger on June 8 was easily one of the most cringe-worthy televised wrestling moments of 2016. Cien broke the curtain in an outfit that looked like it was going for Razor Ramon and landed on Johnny B. Badd wearing Jimmy Garvin-era Freebird pants. The crowd was silent for his collection of ambitious but casually sloppy moves and nearly rioted for his pillow-soft elbow bunts. It felt like the opening night of a glitzy Broadway show that would be closed by the next morning.
Throughout the summer, Cien’s matches were a consistent excuse to go make a snack in the kitchen. His movements in the ring, while athletic, always seemed just a hair mistimed. Much like the original Sin Cara, Cien felt like a talented luchador springing headfirst into a stylistic wall. The only sounds during his matches were silence and booing for light strikes.
Then, the braintrust at NXT made a simple move that the booking of the WWE main roster proves isn’t obvious: they switched the rejected babyface heel, and it worked. By turning Cien on the wildly popular Cedric Alexander in the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic, the promotion gave Almas permission to stop trying so hard to make people like him. Since that night in October, Cien has blossomed into NXT’s best pure singles heel.
This week, those talents were on display against Lorcam, who Cien has wrestled before in a number of dark matches. The show-opening match felt like something that might have been on NWA World Championship Wrestling in the mid-to-late 80s. While the match was functionally a showcase for Cien, Lorcam shone throughout the match and came away looking stronger than ever. Cien worked holds and cruelly beat away at his opponent, but never got the better of him until he applied his finishing maneuver. It was almost exactly the structure that wrestlers like Ric Flair and Tully Blanchard used when wrestling legendary jobbers like George South and the Mulkey Brothers.
Cien was a miserable babyface because he was trying too hard to make people like him. He’s a tremendous heel because he can, seemingly effortlessly, make the crowd like his opponent. By selling, whining and taking shortcuts, Cien effectively makes the crowd want to see him lose and makes his opponent seem like a superior competitor. Even relatively new or unproven faces become instant fan favorites against Cien. This ability of the featured star to make the underneath talent seem bigger and more charismatic than they are gets to the root of what made the job match-centric studio wrestling format work: everybody looked like a worthy competitor, even the job guys.
At TakeOver: Orlando WrestleMania weekend, Cien will put these old school abilities to work against the debuting Aleister Black (the former Tommy End). While Almas seems poised to do the honors for the Black, his MVP performance on this week’s edition of NXT showed that there’s nobody better in the company to give a debuting star what they need to get over.
David Gibb
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