(Lest I risk driving it off the front page: it’s a podcast weekend.  The show is just two posts down!)

But now: WWE’s Night of Champions, a one-match show if ever I saw one.  Ironically, that one match also happens to be the one that doesn’t fit the show’s gimmick, which is supposed to be that every title is on the line.  This isn’t the draw that the company seems to think it is.  The two versions of the world title – which should really be consolidated into one, especially given the continuing erosion of the brand split – are defended on every show anyway, so all they’re really promising is defences of minor championships like the Intercontinental Title, which not many people care about.

At the top of the card, however, the curious CM Punk storyline rambles onwards…

1.  No-DQ: CM Punk v Triple H.  No titles; no championships.  Triple H was written back into the show a few weeks back when he replaced Vince McMahon as the storyline boss of the company (though, unlike Vince, he’s more explicitly accountable to a board of directors).  Theoretically that makes him a retired wrestler; in reality, it seems more likely that he’s going to work a reduced schedule.

Despite being a publicly listed company, the WWE is still mostly owned by the McMahon family and Triple H (who married into the family) is indeed the heir apparent to Vince’s role.  The transfer of power hasn’t happened for real, but the company presumably figures that enough people know the plan for it to carry a certain degree of added credibility.

CM Punk, meanwhile, is still in the awkward position of having to follow through on his new “voice of the hardcore fans” gimmick.  And that’s a difficult one to sustain, especially when the idea is that he voices the criticisms that online fandom has of the show itself.  You can’t keep that up indefinitely; and the audience reaction varies wildly from city to city depending on the mix of casual and hardcore fans in the crowd.

At any rate.  On the last show, Summerslam, Punk and Cena had a match to unify their versions of the Raw world title.  Punk won, but immediately got laid out by Kevin Nash, the lumbering semi-retired 1990s champion who’s also been written back into the show.  Alberto Del Rio then cashed in Raw’s Money in the Bank title shot to pin Punk for the title.  Since Punk and Cena are both owed title rematches, Cena’s getting his shot first.  That leaves Punk to wrestle…

…well, logically, to wrestle Kevin Nash.  And indeed, that’s the match they initially seemed to be promoting, but for some reason there’s been a last-minute swerve to Triple H.  The story seems to be that Nash failed a medical check or something.  I can’t say I’m losing any sleep over it; Punk versus Nash would have been a dreadful match.  It’s too early for Punk and Triple H, but they’ll have a much better match, and at least there’s a tension there that makes sense: Punk is the obnoxiously abrasive critic of the company, Triple H is the company.  There’s also a secondary layer, which is that Punk accuses Triple H of being in cahoots with Nash, and Triple H insists he isn’t.

This is a no-DQ match (presumably to give Nash an excuse to interfere, which makes Punk look like an idiot for agreeing to it).  There is also a very odd stipulation that Triple H has to quit as COO if Punk wins; again, it’s far too early for that stip and I doubt anyone really buys it.  It might make sense if they’ve suddenly decided that they need to get Triple H back into the mix as a regular main eventer, but I’d be surprised.  On the whole, I’m expecting Triple H to win with outside interference that he might-or-might-not be aware of, to further the storyline.

2.  WWE Title: Alberto Del Rio v John Cena.  Del Rio is a heel champion who won the title last month by ambushing Punk with the “any time, any place” Money in the Bank Title Shot he won on the show before.  But even though he won the title dubiously, the company seems keen to give him some degree of credibility.  He’s already defended it on TV against Rey Mysterio (who was also owed a rematch – don’t ask), and knocked off a couple of midcarders in reasonably credible fashion.  Despite this, the writers would also have us believe that he’s been running scared of John Cena; this feels a bit writing-by-numbers.

They’ve been planning to get the title onto Del Rio for months, and so I’d be surprised if he lost it too quickly.  Part of the mentality is apparently that they need more Hispanic stars, and they want to build Del Rio up so that they can turn him babyface down the line.  It might work.  Del Rio certainly has charisma and his matches are usually decent.  But he’s also something of a cartoon midcarder.  He’s a supposed Mexican aristocrat with his own Spanish-language ring announcer (who is, admittedly, awesome – his enthusiasm for proclaiming his boss’s name seems to know no bounds).  He feels slightly out of place among the main eventers who are, relatively speaking, less ridiculous than that.  And he’s been in the midcard for so long that he’s yet to acquire the aura of a main eventer.  Frankly, booking him as somebody who’s scared of John Cena isn’t the way to help that.

Still, this should be a solid enough match.  Del Rio should win, but I expect some degree of shenanigans if only to protect Cena.

3. World Heavyweight Title: Randy Orton v Mark Henry.  The Smackdown main event is not so much a match as a demonstration of how little depth there is on that side of the roster.  Purely in storyline terms, it makes sense; Mark Henry, “the World’s Strongest Man” (he isn’t, but in his prime he was getting there), has been destroying people for several weeks now, he’s the most prominent heel for Randy Orton to defend against, and so they ought to have a match.

But.  Mark Henry has been under contract since 1996, and while he looks great and has the right charisma, the bottom line is that the matches have never been up to much.  Every so often the company decides to have another go at pushing him, seemingly unable to believe that somebody so big might not be a potential main eventer – and it never takes.  I can’t imagine it being any different this time around.

Orton surely has to win; the question is where they go from there.  There seem to be some tentative moves to position Cody Rhodes as the next challenger, which really does smack of desperation – midcarders don’t get much more midcard than Rhodes – but would probably make for a better match.

4.  Intercontinental Title: Cody Rhodes v Ted DiBiase.  Rhodes is currently the holder of Smackdown’s secondary title, with his curious gimmick of claiming to be deformed despite copious evidence to the contrary.  (In a nice piece of staging, rather than having him wear make-up, they’ve given him a slightly distortive transparent protective mask.)  This is actually a decent enough idea; having him hand out paper bags for fans to put over their heads, on the other hand, was a really stupid one, since it’s not generating any sort of heel reaction, and only detracts from his act.

Rhodes and DiBiase used to be a tag team back when Randy Orton was a heel and they were his  sidekicks – a role that did absolutely nothing for them, since the writers forgot to ever have them beat anyone, so their function was to be beaten up by people who were after Orton.  After a half-hearted reunion on Smackdown, we now seem to have reached the belated Ted DiBiase babyface turn.  There was a point a few years ago when this could have worked, but I don’t see it taking now.  While he’s a solid enough wrestler, DiBiase just doesn’t seem to have the charisma and personality to connect with the fans in a big way.

That being said… given the desperate shortage of heels on Smackdown, and the WWE’s curious conviction that secondary champions should always lose their titles before getting a shot at the world title, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if DiBiase won here.  It’s the wrong call – if Rhodes is going to feud with Orton, he should do it as Intercontinental Champion – but it’s the sort of wrong call the company is likely to make.  I expect a technically sound match that the crowd doesn’t really get into.

5.  US Title: Dolph Ziggler v Jack Swagger v John Morrison v Alex Riley.  A fourway, perhaps because this is a relatively rare example of a heel/heel feud, and the writers want to get some babyfaces into the match as well.

Ziggler is the defending champion.  He’s a heel, as is his manager Vicky Guerrero.  Vicky is thinking of taking on fellow heel Swagger as another client.  Ziggler doesn’t like the sound of that.  So Ziggler and Swagger are feuding (in a way that tends to suggest it might be heading towards a babyface turn for Swagger, but we’re not there yet).  Essentially the last few weeks have seen Vicky waver about whether to align herself with Swagger, and misfiring attempts to get the two heels to work together as a team.

Riley and Morrison… are basically midcard babyfaces with nothing else to do.  Conceivably one of them could get the title if the idea is for Swagger to cost Ziggler his belt.  But I suspect the better way forward for the title is simply for Swagger to win the belt by pinning one of the babyfaces, or even (perhaps) for Ziggler to be taken out of the picture and Vicky to then help Swagger win.  There are three decent wrestlers in this match, and the inexperienced Riley can be fine in the right context, so this could be alright.

6.  Tag Team Titles: Air Boom v. Miz & R-Truth.  Air Boom is the fan-voted name for Kofi Kingston and Evan Bourne – thanks for that, fans – who won the tag team titles a few weeks ago.  Presumably somebody finally woke up and realised that the titles were inexplicably still held by David Otunga and Michael McGillicutty, who had only been given them in the first place because they were lackies of CM Punk in a since-dropped storyline.

So now the titles are on a talented midcard babyface tag team.  The heel challengers are a makeshift team united by their insistence that they’re being overlooked by Triple H’s administration.  Miz is a former world champion, R-Truth has at least challenged for the world title recently… but there doesn’t seem to be any room for them at the top of the card any more.  So they’re making their own luck by challenging for the tag titles instead.  (And if this sounds more like the behaviour of a babyface team… well, yes, it is, but their whining about the new administration is supposed to make them heels by virtue of the irritation factor alone.)

On paper this is a decent match, and it could go either way; the babyfaces might have been intended simply as a device to transition the titles onto a more credible heel team.  But I’d say they should be stretching out the feud a while even if that is the plan.  It’s not like the heels have anything else to do, and the tag team division needs a bit of stability with some reasonably credible champions.  Babyfaces to retain, then, but not necessarily in a decisive way.

7.  Divas Title: Kelly Kelly v Beth Phoenix.  The latest stage of the “Divas of Doom” storyline.  The waif-like Kelly successfully defended her title against Natalya last month, so this time she defends against Natalya’s partner Beth Phoenix.  All this is supposed to be part of a wider feud between (broadly) the credible female wrestlers and the ones who were plainly hired on appearance.  This has to lead to the heels winning at some point, but story structure suggests some sort of schtick where Kelly manages to beat them both individually before finally losing to some contrived two-on-one affair.  I don’t expect wonders from this.

Worth buying?  This one’s on Sky Sports in the UK, so it’s not an issue here.  HHH/Punk sounds decent and a lot of the undercard is solid on paper.  Not so sure about Mark Henry in a semi-main event, though.