(Probably the only thing I’m going to post today, but then it’s a week of middle chapters, plus some books I’m still getting in physical form and haven’t received yet…)

Summerslam is traditionally the second-biggest pay-per-view of the year behind Wrestlemania (a distant second, admittedly), as well as the occasion for the WWE’s annual excursion to California.  I suspect I’m going to be a bit busy to sit down and watch a three-hour show, and one which is basically a two-match card anyway, but let’s run it down anyway.

1.  WWE Title: John Cena (c) v Daniel Bryan (Special Guest Referee: Triple H).  Ah, now there’s quite a lot going on here.  While I’m sure this’ll be given plenty of time with the expectation of having a good match, there are a number of major storylines circulating around this one.

This is a face/face match, something that often works with John Cena, since he divides the audience so much.  The kids love him, the men less so. The starting point for the storyline here is that in a fit of pique, Vince McMahon has appointed inexperienced dimwit Brad Maddox as General Manager of Raw.  For his first action, Maddox allowed Cena to choose his own opponent for Summerslam, a move that even Cena promptly derided as unfathomably stupid.  But Cena is a babyface, so instead of just choosing a no-hoper, on the strength of audience reaction, he gave the title shot to Daniel Bryan, a popular upper midcarder emerging from a year in a comedy act with Kane, and a former holder of the (distant second) Smackdown title.  Basically, the idea is that Cena has chosen to bestow the title shot on a popular and credible challenger who deserves the opportunity.

Cue the second strand of the storyline, which is the ongoing feuding among the members of the McMahon family who run the company.  Exactly who has the ultimate say in running the company remains stubbornly obscure; now that the company is floated on the stock exchange, there are occasional mutterings about a board of directors who can overrule people.  But on a day to day basis, the major authority figures in the WWE are the GMs who run Raw and Smackdown (Maddox and Vickie Guerrero), and above them, Vince McMahon, his daughter Stephanie, and her husband, retired wrestler Triple H.  Attempts have been made to write Vince out from time to time, but somehow he keeps emerging from the shower a few months later as if nothing had happened.

At any rate, the big idea here is that Vince has old-fashioned ideas about what makes a champion, and wants to push big huge guys, not (by his standards) scrawny nerds with unusual beards.  So he doesn’t like having Bryan in the main event and definitely doesn’t want him as champion.  Triple H, representing the next generation of management, likes Bryan, respects him as a wrestler, and is happy to run with his fan support.  And Stephanie is trying to bridge the gap by attempting to repackage Bryan so that Vince will like him more.  Meanwhile, Bryan has made very clear that, while he likes and respects Cena and all, he sees Cena as basically a company man who loves the big stage, while he (Bryan) is a wrestler who just loves to wrestle and happens to be doing so here.

Oh, and Vince tried to appoint a stooge as special guest referee, presumably to screw Bryan.  Triple H blocked that and appointed himself instead.  So the idea is that he’s there to fend off any schemes.  Both Bryan and Cena have explicitly said that they trust him.  They clearly haven’t watched much wrestling, since while it’s not completely unknown for a guest referee to simply call the match, it’s getting there.

That’s the storyline.  This all plays off the fact that conventional wisdom among many hardcore fans is that Bryan is indeed not Vince’s idea of a champion, and off the fact that Bryan was indeed a workhorse of the independent circuit before coming to the WWE roster, while Cena is the company’s favourite main event wrestler, who has been headlining shows seemingly forever.  So the storyline doubles as a tacit acknowledgement that the company knows this is what everyone thinks.

Plus, a strand three: at last month’s show, Randy Orton won the Money in the Bank title shot that gives him the opportunity to challenge for the WWE Title at any time.  He isn’t booked on this show but he’s been lurking around the margins hinting that he’ll show up and cash in.  Logically, that ought to depend on how battered the winner of the main event is.  But he’s bound to turn up in some capacity.

And still a further consideration: Cena is working hurt.  He has a major swelling in his elbow and supposedly he’s going to be taking some time off for surgery.  That points strongly towards him losing the title on Sunday, either to Bryan or to Orton.  Fortunately, we’re at a point in the storyline where that would very likely have happened anyway.

So.  What happens?

The match itself will likely be very good.  Cena has good matches with most of his opponents, and Bryan is one of the best wrestlers around, so (subject to the inevitable problems of getting the audience to buy into false finishes when everyone knows that the match can’t end without the referee doing something dodgy) it ought to be a strong match.

My guess would be that Bryan wins the title, and then Orton cashes in to steal it from him, turning heel and aligning himself with Vince, who then gets his classic-looking champion.  Then you have several months of Bryan chasing to regain the title and become champion for real, which should fill time nicely while Cena’s out of circulation, also building the McMahon family storylines into the bargain.  Given that Orton’s not already wrestling on the show, I suspect any cash-in match he does is going to be more than just the usual walk-on, but you never know.

Well, that was long.  The rest of these will be a lot quicker.

2.  CM Punk v Brock Lesnar.  Upon his recent return, CM Punk turned babyface and split with his manager Paul Heyman.  Heyman is not very happy about that, leading to violent retribution and ultimately this match against Heyman’s other main event client, Brock Lesnar.  All common sense says that Punk ought to win this one, since he’s only just switched sides, and Lesnar’s on a very limited contract where he works very few dates.  So if Lesnar wins, there’s no obvious opportunity to continue the story.

However… at the start of the week betting suddenly lurched in favour of Lesnar winning.  Yes, really, you can bet on this stuff.  The WWE has had an issue over recent months with the leaking of results, which have made the betting odds a ludicrously good predictor of results, if you’re minded to pay attention to such things.  That could be the reason for the move.

On the other hand, it could just be that everyone saw Punk get the upper hand on Monday night’s Raw, and the WWE has a very predictable booking pattern where the guy who wins on the penultimate show usually loses at the PPV.  And the WWE has a tendency towards last minute changes of mind anyway.

My guess would be that Punk wins in order to further his feud with Paul Heyman, in what looks on paper like a strong match.

3.  World Heavyweight Title: Alberto Del Rio (c) v Christian.  Some odd booking here.  The Smackdown title has long been a distant second to the Raw title, but this match appears to have been thrown together more or less arbitrarily.  Del Rio, initially meant to be a babyface but floundering in the role, lost the title a while back to Dolph Ziggler when Ziggler cashed in last year’s Money in the Bank title shot (he’s a patient sort of guy), only for Ziggler to spend most of his title reign out with a concussion.  When he returned, Del Rio got his long-awaited rematch and won the title straight back after aggressively going after the head.  This was a double turn, with Del Rio reverting to heel status and Ziggler turning face, or at least tweener.  And since it reflected the way fans wanted to react to these wrestlers, it worked fine.

You might have thought this would lead into a further feud between Ziggler and Del Rio.  But instead, it seems Ziggler is first going to have the obligatory break-up feud to detach him from his heel stragglers AJ Lee and Big E Langston.  That leaves Del Rio without an opponent, and so long-serving upper midcarder Christian is getting the shot.  He’s held this title before, but he’s been out of contention for a good long while.  They’re trying to push it as his last opportunity, though that feels more like a case of trying to tag a theme onto a randomly assigned feud.  It’ll be a solid match; it’d be very surprising if Christian won.  He’s just not generally used at that level any more, and the promotion has been desultory – aside from Del Rio turning on his sidekick Ricardo Rodriguez and getting rid of him.  The thinking there seems to be that people actually like Ricardo, the overenthusiastic Mexican ring announcer, and so he’s detracting from Del Rio’s heel act.  In theory that makes sense, but in practice at least the crowd liked seeing Ricardo; Del Rio’s a bit vanilla without him, and Ricardo has no obvious role at all once he’s separated from Del Rio.  Of course, it could all be a double bluff, in which case, so much the better.

I’d expect a good match, with Del Rio retaining.  But again, a couple of qualifications. For no apparent reason, they did this match as a non-title bout on Smackdown two weeks ago.  That’s very odd and would point against a straight repeat here.  (Then again, it doesn’t make much sense however you look at it.)  And there’s also Damien Sandow out there, holding the 2013 Money in the Bank contract for this title.  He’s got a match further down the show, but that’s no reason to think he won’t cash in here.  At least it gives him a reason to be at the show.

4.  Ring of Fire Match: Kane v Bray Wyatt.  This is the main roster debut of Bray Wyatt, leader of the Wyatt Family.  These guys have been around on NXT for a while, with an interesting southern gothic mind-cult gimmick.  Basically, Wyatt is superficially genial but blatantly a bit of a psycho.  When the others are wrestling, he watches from his rocking chair with a beatific smile.  Their theme music – “Broken Out In Love” by Mark Curzon & The Rels – is a magnificent choice, inappropriately laid back to the point where it takes on a tinge of subdued menace.

Thus far, only his thugs Erick Rowan and Luke Harper have wrestled on Raw, so this will be Wyatt’s (televised) (main roster) in-ring debut.  Kind of.  He used to be Husky Harris, a second wave member of Nexus – but we’re all politely ignoring that, because this drastic revamp has improved him immeasurably.  His wrestling has also got vastly better since he was last seen on the main roster.  Assuming that the main show writers can maintain the careful balance that the NXT show managed (and NXT is a surprisingly good programme in many ways), he should do very well.

It’s a virtual guarantee that Wyatt is winning.  It makes absolutely no sense for him to lose his first match, and besides, Kane is about to go off and film a movie.

For some ungodly reason, this is a “Ring of Fire Match”, which appears to involve nothing more than surrounding the ring by pyro.  Quite why we’re doing a Ring of Fire Match has never really been fully explained.  Very occasionally over the years, the WWE has done Inferno matches, where the ring is surrounded by flames and the aim is to set your opponent on fire (i.e., set light to the carefully prepared part of his costume so he can show off his first-week stuntman skills).  It’s only been done four times because it can never really live up to the hype.  It also sits uneasily with the WWE’s aspirations to a PG rating.  So the company has been very clear that the aim here is not to light your opponent on fire.  The fire is apparently just there to keep people out.  You win the match in the normal way.  I think it’s just going to be a distraction to liven up a match that probably didn’t need it.  I suppose it’s possible that they could light Kane on fire in order to write him out, but it seems unlikely in the current environment.

5.  Mixed tag: Dolph Ziggler & Kaitlyn v Big E Langston & A J Lee.  See match 3 above for the back story here.  This is basically an exercise in detaching Ziggler from his former heel cohorts so that we can all move on with our lives.  It’s far enough down the card that it won’t get an enormous amount of time, though, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the result here was to have AJ pin Kaitlyn in order to drag matters out a little bit further.

Oh yes, Kaitlyn.  She’s the former holder of the women’s title, which she lost to AJ won a while back, after her friend Layla El turned on her.  (Layla will presumably be at ringside here to give the heels their numerical advantage.)  I would tentatively suspect that Kaitlyn gets moved out of the title picture from here, in order to give more prominence to the women who are appearing in Total Divas, of which more shortly.  That would also point in favour of a heel win with the women having the decision.

6.  Cody Rhodes v Damien Sandow.  Botched babyface turn alert!  Rhodes and Sandow used to be the heel tag team Team Rhodes Scholars.  Sandow’s gimmick is that he’s a condescending self-proclaimed intellectual.  Rhodes’ gimmick is that he has a moustache.  You can perhaps see the problems already.

Both were in last month’s multi-man ladder match for the Smackdown Money in the Bank title shot.  Cody was about to win, Damien pushed him off the ladder and took the briefcase.  Cody has been out for revenge ever since.  For some reason this is meant to make him a babyface.

The obvious problem here is that, while Sandow is certainly a heel by dint of his personality, he didn’t actually screw Cody – he just beat him in a match where they weren’t supposed to be working as a team anyway.  It’s not like he cheated, or even made some sort of appeal to their friendship as a distraction.  He just won.  At worst he hung around in the background waiting for an opportunity to win with minimum effort, but that’s hardly epic villainy.  Combine that with Cody’s rather ill-defined character (which has been watery ever since they dropped the “obsessed with his appearance” stuff a while back, and replaced it with not very much), and you’ve got a weak feud.

If they’re determined to push Cody as a babyface – and admittedly he’s gone as far as he was going to get as a heel – then he should win here, and Sandow can go on to cash in his briefcase later on.  Honestly, though, given the reactions to date, I’d be tempted just to have Sandow win, since he’s obviously the one who’ll matter in the long run.  Cody’s a perfectly solid wrestler, but I just don’t see him having the charisma to make it any further up the card.  The match itself should be fine but I don’t expect much heat.

7.  Natalya v Brie Bella.  Here’s a rarity – a women’s match on PPV not featuring the champion (who’s wrestling in the mixed tag).  It’s here because these two are both featured heavily in Total Divas, a reality show about the women’s division which , to the astonishment of fans and journalists alike, has actually done well in the ratings.  That’s a reality show in the modern sense of featuring no reality at all, of course, which makes it a perversely good fit for the WWE.  Reality TV is the new kayfabe – acting talent and plausibility not required.

Assorted other cast members will be at ringside.  Total Divas will actually be airing opposite Summerslam over on E – so this is more of a gesture of goodwill than something actually intended to woo Total Divas‘ largely female audience.

The plan at one point was apparently to have a tag match with both Bella Twins against Natalya and TV presenter Maria Menounos, who is a genuine fan and has wrestled very occasionally in the past.  As I recall, she’s actually surprisingly acceptable for an amateur – and let’s be honest, the women’s division has more than a few performers who aren’t even that.  But Nikki Bella’s out with a stress fracture, and it seems that Menounos is instead going to end up wrestling alongside Natalya in a match at Summerslam Fan Axxess, of all things.  I can only assume they’re filming it for an upcoming episode of the reality show.  Conceivably they’ll do something at that show to feed into the pay-per-view.

I haven’t seen Total Divas – I’m not sure it’s even airing in the UK – but by all accounts it’s a truly bizarre mishmash of people being in and out of character, in stories that are transparently staged.  (Though – spoiler! – Natalya’s wedding at the end of the season is real.)  The collaboration between E and WWE is weirdly appropriate, since reality TV is the new kayfabe.  But Total Divas lives in a weird twilight between WWE continuity and its own equally fictional backstage world.  So you’ve got Daniel Bryan and the Funkadactyls being referred to by their real names, but the Bella Twins still being called the Bella Twins.  The last episode apparently invited viewers to accept that they had witnessed a shoot huracanrana, which, er, no.  It’s all very odd.

It doesn’t matter in the slightest who wins this, and it’ll probably be short and okay.

8.  WWE United States Title: Dean Ambrose (c) v Rob Van Dam.  This is is on the pre-show, which seems bizarre, but they’ve been putting better matches on that show of late.   Ambrose is a member of the Shield, who are clearly being downgraded as a priority of late, though it’s also true to an extent that there’s only so long they can continue killing everyone in sight, and at some point we’ve got to move on to something else.  It’s probably getting on for time for the Shield to suffer a serious reverse and have them come back from it, so I wouldn’t be totally shocked to see a title change with either of these matches (though both would be overkill).  Ambrose and RVD could well have a decent match if they’re given time on the pre-show – and in the last couple of months, pre-show matches have been given a reasonable amount of time to run their course.

The other members of the Shield – Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns – are the Tag Team Champions, but they’re not currently booked on the show.  However, the last couple of weeks of TV have positioned them against Mark Henry and the Big Show.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the pre-show match ends in a massive brawl to set up either a tag match or a six-man on the PPV itself.  If it’s a tag match, the Shield will likely retain after losing by DQ; if it’s a six-man, they probably just lose.

Worth getting?  Well, there’s some interesting stuff, and very little that looks set to be bad.  If I had time to watch it, I’d be getting it.