I’m writing this on Thursday night, before Smackdown airs, so by the time you read this post, it may well be out of date.  But probably not.  Bragging Rights, Sunday’s WWE pay-per-view, is a classic example of a show that’s only on the schedule because the company stubbornly refuses to accept that it didn’t work last year – and so they’re going to do it again this year, in order to prove that it definitely, absolutely doesn’t work.

In the event, the company seems to have rather lost interest in the business of wrestling this last week, preferring to hurl itself into a frankly ludicrous tantrum over some of the negative press coverage arising from Linda McMahon’s Senate run.  Strictly speaking the WWE isn’t allowed to campaign for the boss’s wife, but Vince McMahon is apparently so incensed by what he sees as unjustified attacks on his beloved business that he’s started devoting airtime to an absurd campaign which he calls “Stand Up For WWE”, in which fans are invited to sign some sort of online petition.  Unfortunately for him, most of the criticisms of the WWE are entirely justified, and he doesn’t have any convincing rebuttal to offer.  Some of them are a bit outdated – the company has actually being doing PG programming for at least a year now – but they’re perfectly valid if your point is to criticise what the company was like when Linda was CEO.

So, while the company embarks on a high-profile attempt to make itself look stupid, it’s unlikely we’ll being seeing any last-minute moves to flesh out this half-baked card.  (Not least because Smackdown is taped on Tuesday nights, so we already know everything that happens in the ring.)  There’ll probably be a couple of last-minute additions to fill time, but that’s about it.

The high concept of Bragging Rights is that it’s a Raw versus Smackdown show, headlined by a Raw vs Smackdown 14-man tag team elimination match in which… absolutely nothing is at stake.  Hence the name.  If Raw and Smackdown had stronger separate identities, this might kind of work.  But since wrestlers travel back and forth freely for much of the year, it’s not really that big of a deal.  And as we’ll see, many of this year’s team members don’t even have particularly strong associations with their respective brands.  Bragging Rights did rather badly in 2009, and there’s little reason to think things will be different the second year round.

The logo for this year incorporates the Nexus faction’s “N” symbol, for no discernible reason.  Apparently at one point there was talk of doing a three-way tag match – Raw vs Smackdown vs Nexus – but if so, that was dropped a while back.  Shame, because it might have been more interesting.

1.  Bragging Rights 14-man elimination match: Team Raw (The Miz, CM Punk, Sheamus, John Morrison, R-Truth, Santino Marella & Ezekiel Jackson) v. Team Smackdown (The Big Show, Edge, Rey Mysterio, Jack Swagger, Kofi Kingston, Alberto Del Rio & Tyler Reks). As I’ve endeavoured to explain, this is basically a completely random 14-man tag match, with both teams comprised of a mixture of babyfaces and heels, and with nothing in particular resting on the outcome.  There’s been plenty of build up in terms of qualifying matches to get on the team, but the bottom line is that it’s just Raw versus Smackdown.

For what it’s worth, Smackdown won last year – as the weaker brand, it needed the help.  The Big Show was on the Raw team that year, but he turned on his teammates and cost them the match.  Now he’s on the Smackdown roster, he’s turned babyface, and he’s the team captain.  There have been occasional mutterings about what happened last year, but since he’s not a heel any more, it’s hard to see that going anywhere.

The teams selected are decidedly odd.  Half of them make reasonable sense.  On Raw, you’ve got Miz and Sheamus (a couple of headliners with nothing else to do this month), and Morrison and R-Truth (upper midcarders similarly between storylines).  And on Smackdown, you’ve got Big Show and Mysterio as the wheel-spinning main events, with Swagger, Kingston and Del Rio as the midcarders.  So far, so good.

CM Punk and Edge… are main eventers, but they’ve only just switched brands a couple of weeks ago, for wholly unconnected reasons.  You might have thought it would make more sense to hold off the trade until after this show, so that they could wrestler for the teams they’re actually associated with.  And you’d be right.  But no, they’re both wrestling for their new brands, hammering home how little any of this matters.

After that it just gets weird.  Santino Marella is a comedy act who barely ever wins – why you’d pick him for a qualifying match, let alone for the actual team, is mystifying in storyline terms.  Ezekiel Jackson hasn’t been seen since February, when he was feuding with Christian over the ECW Title.  After ECW was shut down, they were going to move him to Smackdown… and now they’re putting him on Raw.  He has no established connection with the show whatsoever.  What’s he doing in this match?  As for Tyler Reks, he’s an ECW midcarder who’s barely been seen on television since 2009.  He was notionally drafted to Smackdown in April when ECW folded, but he’s never been used.  And now he’s padding out the Smackdown team.  Why, for god’s sake?

None of this makes any particular sense, and none of it does anything much to build interest in the match.  There are enough talented wrestlers in here that it’s bound to be okay – the really useless people will get pinned rapidly or be concealed in the mix – but it’s simply impossible to figure out why we’re supposed to care.  And that’s death for a main event.

For whatever it may be worth, Smackdown will probably win, because they’ve just moved to a new network, and once again the perception is that they need the help.

2.  WWE Title: Randy Orton v. Wade Barrett. Ah, a match that’s part of a half-decent angle.  On the last show, John Cena wrestled Wade Barrett, with the stipulation that if Cena won, Barrett’s Nexus faction had to disband, and if Barrett won, Cena would join Nexus.  Cena lost (through outside interference, of course) and has been drafted as a reluctant member of Nexus.  There’s a ruling in place that he has to honour the spirit of the stipulation or get booted out of the company, so despite being a babyface member of a heel faction, he can’t simply refuse to participate.  This is a classic old-school wrestling angle, the idea being to build up Cena vs Barrett for months before finally delivering it.  And it seems to be working, with everyone playing their roles pretty well.

Barrett got this title shot by winning a battle royal with Cena’s reluctant assistance, and now Cena is supposed to be in his corner for the match.  So obviously the idea is that Cena’s supposed to intefere and help Barrett win the title.  The tension is: will he do as he’s told, or will he try to get away with faking it?  (And will we be able to tell the difference, if he tries and it doesn’t work?)

The downside with this sort of match is that Randy Orton, the defending champion, ends up as something of a third wheel in a story where his title is on the line.  There is a school of thought that says matches like this don’t draw particularly well, because while fans will want to know what happened, they can find that out by tuning in on Monday.  I think that’s a bit too pessimistic, but it’s certainly a challenge for Orton and Barrett to have an entertaining match when everyone knows it can’t end until Cena gets involved.  Even so, I suspect it’ll be decent.

As for who wins… tough call, actually.  Orton hasn’t had the title for that long, but I can’t help feeling he’d be more effective chasing the title than defending it, and that Barrett as champion with Cena as an unwilling bodyguard has more potential in terms of delivering some new stories.

3.  World Heavyweight Title, buried alive match: Kane v. Undertaker. Kane is still the champion, having beaten Undertaker two months running.  Last time, Undertaker showed up with his original manager Paul Bearer in tow, but Bearer turned on him and Kane retained after all.  This actually made a certain degree of sense, because the last time we saw Paul Bearer, the Undertaker was trying to kill him.

But reaction to this storyline remains a bit tepid, perhaps because, although it’s got a bit of internal logic, all this mystical stuff just seems a bit out of place and silly in the context of the shows today.  (As opposed to the Undertaker’s heyday, when his stories were silly and entirely at home.)  The matches have been pretty dreadful so far, and rumour has it this match has been brought forward from the next show, Survivor Series, perhaps in an attempt to get the storyline out of the way.  If so, Undertaker’s presumably winning – he really has to defeat Kane in the end, since you just can’t do a story where Undertaker loses repeatedly and that’s it.  But he’s not the wrestler he used to be, and it’s hard to imagine him as Smackdown’s champion for very long.  If he wins, he won’t have it for long.  If he loses… well, they’ll either have to do some serious rebuilding, or they’ll just leave him a few months and hopes everyone forgets about it.

A buried alive match is exceedingly silly, and basically involves chucking your opponent in a whole and pressing a button while we admire some rudimentary special effects.  This is likely to be awful.

4.  Daniel Bryan v. Dolph Ziggler. Clash of the secondary title holders.  Bryan has the US Title on Raw, Ziggler has the Intercontinental Title on Smackdown.  A couple of altercations to set this up, but it’s basically just a match.  Bryan is extremely good, Ziggler perfectly sound, and on paper this ought to be the best thing on the show.  To be honest, it’s not a particularly smart piece of booking, since both of them could use the credibility of a win.  Bryan’s need is more pressing – but my bet is that he’ll probably lose anyway because the company doesn’t quite seem to understand his appeal, while Ziggler’s cut more to the company’s specifications.

5.  Divas Title: Michelle McCool or Layla v. Natalya. Michelle and Layla are still doing the heel gimmick where they claim to be co-champions and either of them can defend the title.  (Officially, the champion is Michelle, since she won the match that unified the two women’s titles.)  Natalya Neidhart is a decent wrestler who’s spent most of her time standing next to the Hart Dynasty tag team, so it’s nice to see they’re using her properly at last.  The Hart Dynasty is currently doing a break-up angle, but that’s unlikely to play heavily into this.  By the admittedly-not-stellar standards of the WWE women’s division, this will probably be good.  My inclination is that the heels retain, since there seems to be more mileage in the act.

Worth buying? Well, it’s not a PPV in Britain, so at least somebody will be watching it.  For those of you who’d have to pay… Bryan/Ziggler is a good match on paper, and I have some interest in seeing what they do with the Wade Barrett match, but the 14-man tag is pointless, and Kane/Undertaker isn’t likely to get any better.  We’re in completist territory with this one.