For the second month running, the WWE have made my life easy by not announcing a full card for Sunday’s show.  There are four matches officially announced for this show, and only three of them really count.  Presumably there will a couple of other random matches to fill out the card, which probably wouldn’t have done anything for viewership anyway – but there is a reason why promoters have traditionally announced the entire card, namely to avoid giving the impression that they’re just making stuff up at the last minute.  (Even though, in the WWE’s case, they often are.)

This is Elimination Chamber, the show that fills the gap between Royal Rumble in January and Wrestlemania in the spring.  On the January show, Sheamus won the Royal Rumble match, so he gets to challenge for either the Raw or Smackdown title at Wrestlemania.  In an ideal world you would now start the build for that match, but for some reason the WWE has decided that it would be a good idea to use the February show to put up both titles in six-man elimination matches, thus throwing the field of potential champions wide open.  This must be very convenient if you’re prone to last-minute storyline revisal, but it seems an odd time in the year to run matches that inevitably emphasise the potential randomness of the title-holder.

Regardless, that’s what we’re getting.  Both the Raw and Smackdown titles will again be defended in Elimination Chamber matches, which are basically a variant cage match.  Two men start, the other four are in pods inside the cage.  Every five minutes (or so) another man enters the ring. Elimination occurs by pinball or submission.  Last man left is the winner.  It’s pretty simple.

The attentive reader will have figured out that this means finding twelve title contenders (in addition to Sheamus, who’s already in a title match next month and therefore isn’t on this show at all).  As we’ll see, that’s not as easy as it sounds.

1.  Raw Elimination Chamber match, WWE Title: CM Punk v. Dolph Ziggler v. Chris Jericho v. Kofi Kingston v. Miz v. R-Truth.  Punk is the defending champion, and much of the smart money seems to be on him wrestling Jericho for the title at Wrestlemania.  If that’s the plan then the obvious finish here is for Jericho to win the match, so that Punk gets his rematch at Wrestlemania, with Sheamus challenging for the Smackdown title instead.  While that’s rather predictable – and the WWE has a nasty habit of changing plans just to avoid being too predictable, even if the replacement story is worse – it’s a perfectly solid framework in which Jericho and Punk could have a strong feud.  Both are strong talkers and good-to-very-good wrestlers.  They’re the guys you want in a major match at Wrestlemania.  (I was going to say “the main event”, but of course, the true main event is Rock v John Cena, and everyone knows it.)

As for the others… Ziggler has already challenged for the title recently, and he’s a rising mid card heel on the verge of permanent promotion to the main event.  Since he’s already feuded with CM Punk, and there’s no obvious interest in him wrestling Sheamus, he would be a highly unlikely choice.  Miz and R-Truth are former tag team partners who are now feuding with one another – R-Truth taking the babyface role – and common sense says that they’re building to their own match at Wrestlemania, which would seem to rule them both out of contention.  In any event, both seem to have been shifted back to the upper mid card after having mixed success in the main event.  R-Truth is drifting back into a comedy role, and Miz reportedly did himself no favours with management by spectacularly botching a spot a couple of weeks ago where R-Truth dived at him from the ring.  He was supposed to get in the way and break R-Truth’s fall.  He didn’t.  For understandable reasons, wrestlers don’t much like people who can’t be relied upon to catch them.

And as for Kofi Kingston, well, somebody’s got to be in that last pod, particularly given that they don’t want John Cena in this match.  (After all, he’s already facing Rock in a non-title match at Wrestlemania, so it makes no sense for him to challenge for the title here.)

There are enough good wrestlers in here that it should be a good match, as long as the company resists the temptation to try and surprise everyone just for the sake of it.

2.  Smackdown Elimination Chamber match, World Heavyweight Title: Daniel Bryan v. Big Show v. Wade Barrett v. Cody Rhodes v. The Great Khali v. Santino Marella.  Now this is what happens when you commit yourself to a six-man match and have a spate of injuries.

Daniel Bryan is still the defending champion, and doing well in the role.  Common sense says that he’s retaining here and going on to face Sheamus at Wrestlemania.  Again, this would be predictable, but sometimes things are predictable because they’re right.  For Bryan to pull out a fluke win would sit quite happily with his character, and nobody else here is even a serious contender

The other main event wrestlers on Smackdown are Sheamus (but he’s already got his title shot), Mark Henry (but he’s injured), and Randy Orton (who was going to be in this match until he apparently sustained a concussion in a match on Monday’s show).  With them out of the picture, what remains is a rather motley crew.  The Big Show is an established main event wrestler, but he’s been in the title hunt for months, and if he was going to win the title, he should have done it a while ago.  Wade Barrett has been in a main event role in the past, but is currently back in the upper mid card – for once, probably a smart move, as it gives him the chance to pick up some more experience before a renewed push that seems due later in the year.  Cody Rhodes holds the mid card Intercontinental Title, and while he’s a solid heel wrestler, he’s nowhere near being in a position to be elevated to the main event – but he’s a credible name to round out the group.

Unfortunately, he’s not rounding out the group, because there are still two names left.  The Great Khali is an Indian giant of increasingly limited mobility who was briefly pushed as a terrifying monster heel, despite his ring work being the wrong sort of statuesque.  Wisely downgraded a while back to a cheerful mid card babyface, he’s here out of desperation.  And Santino Marella is the last-minute replacement for Randy Orton, who got the slot by winning a battle royal on Smackdown.  He’s a comedy undercard wrestler who has rarely been presented as any sort of serious threat and looks wildly out of place in this match – which could make for some decent comic relief if they handle it right.  Alternatively, he’s a placeholder, intended to be replaced by either Orton or Henry if it turns out that they’re able to wrestle after all.  Unless the company has completely lost its mind, there is not the slightest prospect of his actually winning this match, and I’ll be surprised if he lasts more than a couple of minutes.

For all that the star power is lacking, though, Bryan is an excellent wrestler.  Big Show, Rhodes and Barrett are all perfectly acceptable, and the other two can just about be managed if you use them wisely and eliminate them quickly.  This might still be a decent match.  Or it might be a train wreck.  Reportedly, it’s opening the show, so it’s not like the company isn’t aware of its questionable star power.

3.  Ambulance Match: John Cena v Kane.  Obscure gimmicks that aren’t done very often for a reason, number 28: the Ambulance Match.  Winner is the first person to get their opponent inside an ambulance and shut the doors behind them, or something like that.  This is the latest instalment of a drawn-out feud between Cena and Kane designed to give Cena something to do until the Rock returns to television, and it’s been little short of dreadful.  Very broadly, the idea is that Kane wants Cena to (in some highly nebulous way) “embrace hate”, and Cena won’t.  For no terribly logical reason, therefore, Kane has been attacking Cena’s undercard buddy Zack Ryder and Ryder’s sort-of-girlfriend Eve Torres, who has now apparently decided that she prefers Cena anyway.  (Some of this is also a device to write Ryder off TV for a while so that he can do a movie, or something along those lines.)

The storyline is, if anything, even more appalling than this makes it sound.  I presume the idea is to try to do something with Cena’s divided crowd reactions, in anticipation of the crowds siding uniformly with Rock in the run-up to Wrestlemania.  In theory that’s perhaps a decent idea, but in practice it’s made for some truly terrible melodrama.  And since they wanted to keep the feud going without having Cena lose, last month’s match had one of the least popular finishes known to wrestling – the draw by double count-out.

Cena is presumably winning, since we know he’s not continuing his feud with Kane on the next show, and it makes no sense to have him lose the feud immediately before headlining the biggest show of the year.  Presumably, it will be decisive.  It will also almost certainly be overlong and very, very bad.

4.  Divas Title: Beth Phoenix v Tamina Snuka.  Beth hasn’t defended her title in a while.  The latest challenger is Tamina, now being more prominently advertised as the daughter of ageing legend Jimmy Snuka.  It’s not impossible that they could change the title here, but I rather assume that Beth is just being fed another opponent, and that they’ll want to keep her strong for when Kharma finally makes her return to the regular roster.  It’ll be short and, by the dubious standards of WWE women’s matches, it’ll probably be decent.

Worth getting?  Well, it’s not a PPV in the UK, so the question doesn’t arise.  It’s not a show that I’d pay money for, but there are points of morbid curiosity in here, if nothing else.