After the usual post-Wrestlemania lull, the WWE’s pay-per-view schedule gets back underway this weekend.  Frankly, I probably won’t have time to watch this one anyway, but I can’t honestly say it’s a card that gives me a lot of reasons to regret that.  (Except, perhaps, the two Shield matches.)

1.  WWE Title – Last Man Standing Match: John Cena (c) v Ryback.  Cena regained the WWE Title at Wrestlemania to the surprise of precisely nobody, since The Rock plainly wasn’t going to be sticking around forever.  There was in fact some suggestion at one point that he would be doing the (normally) obligatory rematch, but that became academic when he suffered a legitimate injury at Wrestlemania.  So he’s out of the picture for the foreseeable future at least.

That leaves Cena in search of a new opponent.   The company’s solution is to turn Ryback heel.  This is very strange booking.

Here’s the problem.  Ryback was first introduced last year as a killer babyface who ploughed through everyone in his path.  (Well, more or less.  Strictly speaking he was first introduced as Skip Sheffield in the first season of NXT, but we’re all supposed to have forgotten about that.)  This was basically the way Bill Goldberg became a star in the 1990s and it seemed to be taking perfectly well.

Then came the big mistake.  John Cena was injured, the company needed a replacement challenger for CM Punk’s WWE Title at short notice, and Ryback was pushed into the slot.  But Punk couldn’t lose the title at that point, because he was due to lose it to the Rock in January – and the result of pushing Ryback to the top of the card was to kneecap his momentum.  Worse yet, he’s spent most of the subsequent pay-per-views cementing a role as the guy who always loses in the matches that count.  So much for positioning him as a killer.

To revive him, he’s been turned heel – but once again, he’s been immediately placed in a match against John Cena that, by all appearances, he surely can’t win.  Cena only just got the title back and it seems very unlikely that he could lose it after such a short reign.  And the “Last Man Standing” stipulation – this being Extreme Rules, a show built around gimmick matches – rules out any face-saving ending such as a disqualification or screwjob.

So it seems poor Ryback is just going to have to lose again.  I suppose it’s possible they could go for giving him the surprise win, but I’m not sure he’s over enough, and I’m certainly not sure he’s ready to be headlining shows.  This whole thing strikes me as terribly misconceived.

I don’t like Last Man Standing matches anyway – they tend to slow to crawl in the later stages, since the equivalent of a near fall is to have somebody remain motionless for a count of nine.  Cena should win, the match probably won’t be anything special.

2.  Steel cage match: Triple H v Brock Lesnar.  This is a rematch from Wrestlemania, though heaven knows why, considering that their Wrestlemania match was a prolonged exercise in stupefying tedium, played out before a largely silent crowd.  I cannot begin to tell to you how little enthusiasm I have for the prospect of seeing this one again.

It may make a difference that I’m British, actually.  Brock Lesnar is a former WWE champion who left to join the UFC, and became their heavyweight champion for a while.  He’s now back on a sweetheart deal where he only has to wrestle a few matches a year.  Reportedly, his name gives a boost to PPV buys in America, but doesn’t have much impact in the rest of the world, perhaps because it’s mainly the Americans who care about his UFC run.

But mainly, it’s just that they had a terrible match last month and I don’t want to see them again.  Lesnar ought to win, since he’s the one who still wrestles semi-regularly, while Triple H is now effectively retired and working in management.  But for precisely that reason, I expect Triple H to win anyway.

3.  No 1 Contender to World Heavyweight Title – I Quit Match: Alberto Del Rio v Jack Swagger.  This is a last-minute substitution.  The planned match was a three-way ladder match for the World Heavyweight Title – notionally the Smackdown title, though the brand division has been all but abolished by this stage.  That title is currently held by Dolph Ziggler, who finally cashed in his Money in the Bank title shot to take the title from Alberto Del Rio just after Wrestlemania.  Unfortunately, Ziggler suffered a (genuine) concussion last week and can’t wrestle until he’s medically cleared, so we’re getting this instead.

Which is doubly unfortunate, since the ladder match would probably have been quite good.  The Del Rio/Swagger feud, on the other hand, never really took off – which is one reason why they had Ziggler sweep in to liven things up in the first place.  The original idea was to make Del Rio a hero among hispanic viewers by booking him against the revamped Tea Party version of Jack Swagger’s “real American” heel.  That’s not the worst idea in the world, and it’s worked for hispanic-targeted indie promotions, but it hasn’t worked here for a variety of reasons.  Del Rio’s babyface turn was badly undermotivated and hopelessly botched; hamfisted attempts to have him praise the USA as well as Mexico have done him no favours; and crowds seem on the whole to think that wrestlers talking about immigration is not very interesting.  (Relatively few are actually cheering Swagger.  The general impression is that fans in general simply don’t care about the issue.)

So despite some initial media coverage, the feud between these two never developed the heat that the company had hoped for.  But with Ziggler out of the picture, it’s the inevitably logical match, so we’re getting it anyway.

Ironically, the actual match ought to be good; given the number of crazy brawls that are already booked on the show, I suspect there’ll be a lot of submission holds in this one.  Del Rio probably wins, because he’s even more desperate for heat than Swagger, and Swagger has no function without him.  Plus, Ziggler’s a heel, so it makes sense for the babyface Del Rio to get the title shot.

4.  WWE United States Title: Kofi Kingston (c) v Dean Ambrose.  The first of two Shield matches on the show.  The Shield’s winning streak was finally broken on Monday with a somewhat anticlimactic disqualification, possibly because the company was concerned that everyone figured it was an absolutely forgone conclusion that they would win both title matches.

Well, I still think it’s an absolutely foregone conclusion.  The Shield are a priority act, and Dean Ambrose is the one who’s being pushed as a singles wrestler.  True, he’s been pinned before in a singles match, but that was by the Undertaker, and he was still shown as competitive.  If that’s how they’re positioning him, he really shouldn’t be having too much trouble with a perennial midcarder like Kofi Kingston.  Kingston only won the title a few weeks ago, on television, which rather suggests he’s only there because the previous champion, Antonio Cesaro, was a heel, and therefore couldn’t have wrestled Ambrose.

I expect this to be a good match, though – Ambrose has consistently impressed, Kingston can be very good when he’s given the opportunity.  Should be an emphatic win for Ambrose, with enough outside interference from the rest of the Shield to give Kingston a defence.

5.  WWE Tag Team Titles – Tag Team Tornado Match: Team Hell No (Daniel Bryan & Kane) (c) v The Shield (Roman Reigns & Seth Rollins).  A Tornado match, if you’re wondering, is a tag match where all four guys are in the ring at the same time.  Not a stipulation that the WWE do very often, but it makes sense for the sort of chaotic teamwork that the Shield’s matches tend to be built around – and it provides enough confusion to enable Ambrose to interfere freely to help his colleagues.

Team Hell No have held these titles since last September, originally with an “odd couple forced together by circumstances” gimmick.  Over the months they’ve turned into an odd couple who more or less co-operate with one another, and I think the point has come where a title change makes sense.  The Shield will benefit from the titles, while Team Hell No can move into a storyline about whether they want to choose to stick together even though they’re not the champions any more.  The act can continue without the title belts.

Bryan and Rollins are excellent; Kane’s solid and good in his role; Reigns is a rookie but has done perfectly fine in these multi-man matches.  I expect a strong match here and a virtually inevitable Shield win.

6.  Strap match: Sheamus v Mark Henry.  Basically an exercise in finding something to do for two main eventers who have nothing else to occupy them.  The booking for this has been a mess, with the notional babyface Sheamus repeatedly mocking heel Mark Henry, who hasn’t actually been doing anything very heelish – the practical effect being to leave some viewers genuinely wondering whether this is supposed to be a double turn, with Henry emerging as the babyface and Sheamus as the heel.  (That doesn’t appear to be the intention.)

A strap match is another gimmick best left forgotten.  The wrestlers are connected by a leather strap tied to the wrist.  Victory is achieved by… tagging all four turnbuckles in succession.  No, seriously.  The idea is meant to be that, because of the strap, you won’t be able to do this without knocking your opponent out or at least dragging him forcibly around the ring.  It doesn’t lend itself to many possible finishes and on the whole it’s usually pretty limiting.  I don’t see it helping a Mark Henry match any.

Henry should probably win, since he’s been the underdog in the feud, but the booking has been so awful that it’s hard to figure out what they might have in mind.

7.  Extreme Rules Match: Randy Orton v The Big Show.  Two more main eventers in an essentially random match, for which they couldn’t even be bothered thinking of a proper stipulation.  (“Extreme Rules”, in the WWE, normally just means no DQ, no count-out.)  This is a follow-up from a Wrestlemania storyline where Big Show turned on Orton after they lost their match against the Shield, but it’s basically a generic feud to keep the two occupied.  Orton probably wins, on the simple logic that when there’s nothing at stake, the babyface might as well win.

8.  Chris Jericho v Fandango.  Yes, this one doesn’t even get a gimmick.  This is a straight rematch from Wrestlemania, where the evil ballroom dancer (no, really) defeated Jericho in an upset.  That’s an upset from the perspective of the commentators.  To the viewers, it would have been a lot more surprising if a heavily-promoted wrestler like Fandango had lost his in-ring debut.

On the Raw show immediately after Wrestlemania, the fans got terribly excited about Fandango and started singing his theme music throughout the show.  This apparently convinced the WWE that they had a viral hit on their hands, which resulted in some excruciating segments where they attempted to replicate the effect in other towns.  What they missed was that the Raw audience on the night after Wrestlemania is weird – it’s hardcore fans who travelled for the main show and figured they might as well stick around for the next night.  Consequently, it has an unusually high number of Europeans who try to start football chants.

Fandango is an odd character in many ways.  He’s a blatant throwback to the “wrestling [insert job here]” of the late 1980s.  He’s been cast as a ballroom dancer despite displaying no evident aptitude in the field. And he’s accompanied by two alternating dancers who do their best to disguise that.  One is a mystery brunette who nobody seems to know the name of, even the wrestling journalists; reportedly she’s a student and a proper dancer.  The other is a blonde who’s been named as Summer Rae; she’s a wrestler from NXT, where she’s currently feuding with Paige.  She’s not a dancer, though she can just about get by in the role.

Anyway.  Jericho could win here, since he lost at Wrestlemania, but my guess would be that Fandango wins again, albeit by blatant cheating.  Jericho’s role here is to be the veteran star who helps get Fandango’s act up and running; you can rebuild Jericho later, but Fandango needs the high profile wins right now.

9.  The Miz v Cody Rhodes.  This is airing on the YouTube pre-show, and it’s pretty much a case of reminding us all that Miz exists, now that he’s returned from shooting a movie.  He’ll win, and it’ll take about five minutes.

Worth getting?  Well, the Shield matches should be good, as should Jericho/Fandango.  But Cena/Ryback isn’t a classic in the making, Swagger/Del Rio has no heat, and the cage and strap matches sound wretched.  Plus, the worse matches are the ones that will probably get most of the time on this nine-match card.  I’d skip it.