Welcome back, for the first wrestling PPV preview of 2012!

Although this is not the easiest show to preview.  The Royal Rumble is traditionally the second biggest show of the year.  The winner of the titular 30-man battle royal gets to challenge for the world title (or, these days, one of the world titles) in the main event at Wrestlemania.  It is, therefore, the point where storylines kick into gear to start the long build to Wrestlemania in the spring.  It’s been in that role for 25 years now.  And, aware that the Royal Rumble pretty much sells itself, the WWE has more or less left it to do that.  They’ve announced a couple of title matches and something for John Cena; they’ve pushed the Rumble itself in general terms; but they haven’t announced anything else for the undercard, nor have they announced a full list of participants for the Rumble itself.  Apparently there is actually a reason for this.  We shall see.

1.  The 2012 Royal Rumble.  The design of the Royal Rumble match – with wrestlers drawing numbers at (ahem) random and entering in sequence over the course of an hour – is a masterstroke, allowing them to tell a range of stories during the hour.  A straight 30-man battle royal, with everyone starting in the ring at the same time, is usually just turgid.  Until the field is thinned out, there’s no room to do anything.  The Royal Rumble solves that problem brilliantly.

Sure, the element of random luck would make it a ludicrous way for any real sport to choose its top title contender.  But in wrestling, built-in unfairness is a positive boon.

There are always a few surprise participants in the Royal Rumble; it’s a good place for somebody to return from injury, or for a cameo from somebody semi-retired.  This year, however, the list is particularly sketchy.  We know that Miz is entering at the notionally (but not actually) hopeless number 1, because that was set up on Raw.  By implication, we know that his current feuding partner R-Truth, who escaped getting saddled with number 1, is also in the match.  Sheamus and Wade Barrett have both said they’re in.  The long-retired Mick Foley is in, and heaven only knows where that’s heading.  And that makes… five.

The recently returned Chris Jericho might also be in the match, though that’s no guarantee that he’ll actually do anything.  For those of you who haven’t been watching, Jericho returned a few weeks ago with what appears to be a sort of Andy Kaufman gimmick.  His return was trailed by some spectacularly pretentious (and seemingly wholly irrelevant) trailer videos of sinister schoolchildren.  In his first week back, he came out to a rapturous response from the crowd, milked the crowd reaction, milked it some more… and kept milking it for ten dialogue-free minutes, before simply leaving.  He also now has a jacket with flashing lights.  As an exercise in uneventfulness deliberately extended beyond all reason, it’s downright bizarre television.

Week two, he did pretty much the same thing, picked up a microphone, gestured to indicate that he was overcome with emotion by the generosity of the fans’ reception, and left without saying or doing anything.

Week three, he was in a six-man tag match.  He stood on the apron looking incredibly enthusiastic for most of the match, finally tagged himself in, generally fired up the crowd with further demonstrations of enthusiasm, and then tagged himself out and left.  Again, without doing anything.

And this week, Jericho milked the crowd reaction for yet another ridiculously extended period and played a video of his own highlights before finally picking up a microphone and declaring that at the Royal Rumble, it will be the end of the world as we know it.  And then leaving.  And that’s the one sentence he’s spoken in a month since returning to the show.

So he’s going to be on the show doing something and he might be in the match.  Or he might not.  With most wrestlers, this act would be intolerable, but Jericho actually has the charisma to hold a crowd’s attention while testing their patience to ridiculous lengths.  Something tells me he’ll have a number and he’ll still be celebrating with the crowd rather than entering the match a good five minutes after it’s called.

Regardless, somebody has to win the match, and that somebody has to go on and headline Wrestlemania (unless they do something silly like have the title shot change hands in February, but that’s not smart).  The most likely candidates on paper are Randy Orton, just back from injury and ready to re-enter the title picture; and Jericho, widely mooted as a likely challenger for CM Punk.  Jericho/Punk would be a good call; Orton has been on top for years, but would still have a fresh pairing against current Smackdown champion Daniel Bryan, assuming he still has the title in the spring.  Both matches would be excellent.

For some reason, the WWE has been pushing the line that “any WWE superstar is eligible to enter”.   This is apparently laying the groundwork for some sort of surprise twist.  It’s sparked a degree of grumbling from those who’s pointed out that, since the roster includes more than 50 wrestlers, they can’t possibly all be eligible for this 30-man match.  But so be it.  I’m not entirely sure what eligibility barriers they might have in mind; it’s always been the case that even the lowliest jobber is eligible to be in the match, and previous years have established that women are eligible to enter.  They can’t possibly be planning a major role for Hornswoggle, the one midget wrestler under contract.  Might they be planning to have one of the existing world champions enter and set up a unification match?  I’d be surprised, but it would make a degree of sense.

It’s pretty hard to screw up the Royal Rumble.  It ought to be good, and having the field wide open doesn’t greatly bother me, since it’s the sort of match that can carry that.

2.  WWE Title: CM Punk v Dolph Ziggler.  Punk is the defending champion; Ziggler is the heel midcarder who’s clearly on the verge of permanent promotion to the main event.  Whether he actually gets the title on this show is another matter entirely – I don’t see him headlining Wrestlemania, and I don’t particularly favour giving it to him just to have him lose it before the spring.  But he deserves to get a decent run with the title at some point.  (Strictly, he was Smackdown champion for a few days last year, but that was a storyline technicality and it doesn’t really count.)

Moreover, the main focus of this storyline is a feud that isn’t quite clicking between Punk (cast as a latter-day Steve Austin) and John Laurinaitis, the stand-in General Manager of Raw.  Laurinaitis is a retired wrestler who’s been working behind the scenes for years; he was Jim Ross’s successor as head of talent relations.  He’s also a spectacularly stiff actor, which sometimes works to advantage, but mainly just leaves you wondering why the hell the WWE doesn’t hire some actors to play the non-wrestling speaking parts.  The storyline here is that Laurinaitis has appointed himself as referee in a transparent attempt to screw Punk out of the title, but can’t be too blatant about it because of his own tenuous hold on his position.

Matches where the opponent is a stand-in for the real villain can often be tricky to pull off, but Punk and Ziggler should mesh well and have good matches, and Laurinaitis did have a good track record for designing matches back in the day.  I’m not wild about the storyline, but the match has potential.

3.  World Heavyweight Title, cage match: Daniel Bryan v Big Show v Mark Henry.  This is the Smackdown title, currently held by Daniel Bryan.  Bryan was the Smackdown Money in the Bank winner, giving him the right to challenge the champion at literally any time (i.e., ambush them and steal the title).  On the December show, the loveable giant Big Show finally defeated the similarly enormous Mark Henry to win the title – only for Bryan to promptly snatch the title from him.  Since then, Bryan has been steadily turning heel, the story being that he has both Big Show and Henry gunning for rematches and keeps fluking his way through successful title defences even though he’s plainly out powered by both opponents.

At one point, the idea was for Bryan to hang on to the title shot until Wrestlemania, and cash it in there in order to guarantee himself a main event slot.  The change of plan seems to have been precipitated by Henry’s genuine ankle injury, which meant that the title had to come off him.  But Bryan’s done very well in this role; months of burial in the mid card left the audience initially confused by his win, but as an undeserving heel champion, he’s getting real heat.  He’s also an excellent wrestler, and while putting him against giants doesn’t obviously play to his technical strengths, he’s delivering good matches.  (At least on TV; some reports say the untelevised “house show” matches have been hit and miss.)

This match looks to me like a device to finally have Bryan escape his two challengers and move on as champion.  WWE rules allow him to win a cage match by escape over the top, and that seems the likely way of allowing him to get a win over two giants.  The story has heat; I think they’ll get a good match out of it.

4.  John Cena v Kane.  John Cena is wrestling the Rock at Wrestlemania, but the Rock’s not around right now, so instead it’s filler time!  In a storyline which has not been well received – frankly, audiences have reacted to it with eye-rolling disdain – Kane has returned from a lengthy absence to, uh, try to convince Cena to embrace hate or something.  Somewhere along the line, this seems to be intended to play into the divided reaction that Cena often gets from the audiences; it’s conventional wisdom that he’s going to get booed against Rock, and this may have been intended to set up some way of dealing with that reaction.

But while there’s a potentially interesting story to be done with Cena’s divisiveness, this isn’t it.  Cena’s fearsomely loyal underage merchandise-buyers pretty much preclude any permanent departure from formal babyface status, and Kane’s cartoon psychology is ridiculous even by the standards of wrestling.  This is very much a case of a match that they have to do because the storyline needs to be ended; unless there’s some compelling plot point they need to hit for the Rock match, I’d expect Cena to win and get it over with, because the feud isn’t working.

Worth getting?  Sure.  The Rumble’s always good.  The two title matches look like winners.  And… well, that Cena/Kane match sounds pretty dreadful, actually, but I’ll give it a chance.

There are bound to be more matches than this; these four matches can’t possibly stretch to more than two and a half hours at the outside.  Likely schedule fillers would be a random defence of the women’s title by Beth Phoenix, and (perhaps more likely) an outing for the new tag champions Primo and Epico, who should have a nice straightforward win.