No doubt Linkadorf look good. But we've had this situation bfore, Cloud last year looked sub par against Samus/Snake and people expected link to 55 Cloud, he got less than 54 and still lost outside US.
We haven't, on Link's side. Link never looked good last year, he had 4 bad matches and then 2 decent (but not good) SFF beatdowns. The Alucard match was a genuine championship level performance. You're right about Cloud's side though, and there's the added benefit today of these matches being blowouts- I think we already basically believe that Cloud can't match Link's blowouts due to anti-votes.
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2002 Link, 2003 Cloud, 2004 Link, 2005 Link, 2006 Link, 2008 Link, 2010 Link, 2011 Cloud.
Link 6, Cloud 2