Ah, Night of Champions.  The annual show where the entire gimmick is meant to be that every title is defended – and so, of course, one of them won’t be.  Admittedly, that’s because the storyline in question pretty much requires a non-title match, but it shows the limitations of the company committing itself in advance to themed shows.  (I use the word “committing” loosely, obviously.  This is the WWE we’re talking about.)

1.  WWE Title: Randy Orton (c) v. Daniel Bryan.  Last month, you’ll recall, dimwitted Raw GM Brad Maddox allowed John Cena to pick the challenger for his WWE Title.  Being a solid heroic type, Cena played fair and chose Daniel Bryan, setting up the storyline that the McMahon family, who own the company, were divided about whether the misfit underdog Bryan was a remotely acceptable world champion .  As widely expected, Bryan did indeed beat Cena to win the title clean, with Triple H refereeing the match fairly – only for Triple H to attack him immediately after the match and basically hand the title to Randy Orton, who cheerfully cashed in the Money in the Bank title shot he won earlier in the year.

So, we’re left with Triple H and Orton both turning heel, and the entire McMahon family now united around the idea that they want Randy Orton as their corporate-sanctioned champion.  As the former champion, Bryan automatically gets his rematch, but the storyline over the last few weeks has been entirely built around the idea that management are determined to squash him with repeated beatings, though they can’t actually get him to lose a match.  Meanwhile, management has instituted a reign of terror to stop anyone else from coming to assist him.

As for Cena, he’s out of the picture entirely, because he’s having elbow surgery and isn’t due back for months.  The subtext here is that, with Cena out of the way, the company is left with a top babyface who emphatically doesn’t fit the house style.  So the storyline is meant to be built around the idea that we all know (or think we know, at any rate) that the company doesn’t really want Daniel Bryan in this position, even though the fans are behind him.  And that’s fine; always good to have something believable at the core of this story.  From a meta-standpoint, of course, the company is tacitly acknowledging the perception that Bryan has been pushed to the top by the fans (and by circumstances) in the face of management resistance.

In the short term, at least, the storyline has other problems for the rest of the show.  In order to isolate Bryan and present him as the stand-out hero, all the other babyfaces are inevitably cast as being cowardly and impotent (or, in CM Punk’s case, at least indifferent to Bryan’s situation).  That may be a necessary evil in terms of positioning Bryan as the star, if it runs for a few weeks, but it pretty much emasculates almost every other babyface on the card right now, making it rather hard for their own storylines to get any traction.

The actual match will probably be good.  I’m inclined to suspect that Bryan wins, simply because if he loses, I don’t see where the storyline goes.  Orton has no other obvious challengers lined up, and Bryan’s presence in the main event is much more easily justified if they go the Steve Austin route of making him the unwanted champion whom the company is desperate to dethrone.  I can’t help observing, also, that Orton didn’t wrestle on any of this weekend’s house shows, despite being the champion.  (The A-shows were headlined by Bryan wrestling Dean Ambrose for the US Title.)  That’s downright odd, and often indicates an injury – but then again, they may just be trying to confuse people.

2.  Handicap elimination match: CM Punk v. Curtis Axel & Paul Heyman.  This is the match that breaks the “all titles defended” theme.  Axel is the Intercontinental Champion, but bluntly, that title is beneath CM Punk, and besides, he’s almost incidental to the feud here.

CM Punk’s real feud is with his former manager Paul Heyman, with whom he split upon his return to the active roster a couple of months back, leading Heyman to embark on a series of revenge attacks on Punk for having the temerity to go elsewhere.  The idea of this match, obviously, is to sell the pay-off that Punk finally gets his hands on Heyman, since Heyman’s remaining henchman Axel is so far below Punk on the pecking order that you’re meant to think he can’t realistically win.  So once Punk gets rid of Axel, he gets a “match” with Heyman, which is going to be a one-sided beating.

Now a cynic might observe that the smart thing for Heyman to do would be to step into the ring at the start, get himself eliminated by DQ, count-out, or simple verbal submission, and then just leave Axel to wrestle a singles match against Punk with nothing really at stake.  For obvious reasons that’s not very likely to happen, and for whatever reason, non-wrestlers who are forced into a match they don’t want never seem to think of doing it.  If you want to try and rationalise it (and Heyman’s whole status as a “manager” who can be required to do matches is murky to begin with), then you could argue that Heyman doesn’t feel able to so brazenly forfeit the match for the same reasons that he doesn’t feel able to simply refuse to participate.  Quite what reason that is is unclear in the extreme.

Anyhow, my guess would be that Heyman’s team somehow pick up the surprise win here, in order to continue the story.  Punk needs to be kept tied up in this revenge arc because otherwise he’s got little excuse not to turn his attention to Bryan’s plot – Punk’s whole gimmick, when working as a babyface, is that he speaks truth to power and says the unsayable, so he just can’t be presented alongside the other babyfaces as being afraid to stand up to management.  As long as he’s committed to a blood feud with Heyman, that can be glossed over to a degree, though it still feels as if this storyline is taking place in a parallel universe where the Daniel Bryan stuff isn’t happening.

I expect something that’s more of a storyline segment than a match, but with Punk and Heyman involved, it ought to be good.

And now – other stuff to fill out the card!

3.  World Heavyweight Title: Alberto Del Rio (c) v Rob Van Dam.  This is the Smackdown title, which has long been regarded as a distant second.  (Bryan held it for a lengthy period, in fact.)  Del Rio regained the title earlier in the year when he reverted to his more natural heel alignment.  His former sidekick Ricardo Rodriguez remains a babyface and his (temporarily, one assumes) aligned with challenger Rob Van Dam.  It’s basically a routine match which looks to be a case of feeding Del Rio a passably strong opponent.  I’d expect Del Rio to win in order to extend the match for both parties.

4.  WWE Divas Title: AJ Lee (c) v Natalya v Brie Bella v Naomi.  This feud is the latest idea for how to play off the Total Divas reality show (which, as I mentioned last month, clashes with PPVs anyway, rendering cross promotion a bit of a wasted effort).  AJ is the women’s champion.  She’s not in Total Divas.  But everyone else in this match is.  The basic idea is that AJ despises the show and objects to these losers getting so much television time that plainly should go to her.  Pretty much every other woman on the roster who isn’t on Total Divas agrees with her.  So it’s a feud based not along face/heel lines, but on whether you’re on the show or not.  Which kind of makes sense.

It’s presumably being done in part to provide fodder for upcoming episodes of Total Divas, but it makes a certain degree of sense in wrestling terms as well, since the audiences are totally different.  Consequently, AJ’s rants burying the show are actually being cheered by live audiences, who hate it.  This is not unprecedented.  Live crowds are not always representative by any means. The dreadful Diva Search segments from a few years back always died a death live, but still did surprisingly well in the TV ratings.

I don’t expect wonders from a four-person women’s match on the main roster (the women’s division has the uniquely dubious distinction of having significantly better matches on the training show NXT).  Presumably we’ll get the reality show women beating up AJ until they turn on one another, and then AJ sneaks a pin to keep her title.

5.  WWE Tag Team Titles: The Shield (c) v The Prime Time Players OR The Usos OR Tons of Funk OR The Real Americans OR 3MB.  Shield members Roman Reigns & Seth Rollins are still the tag team champions.  The Shield is now aligned with the McMahons as their henchmen in enforcing their reign of terror, all pretence of them wanting to enforce “justice” having been jettisoned by this point.  (And to be fair, it was always pretty heavily hinted that they were just out to make a name for themselves.)

The Shield will defend their titles against the winners of a “tag team turmoil” match on the pre-show.  That’s basically a gauntlet match – two teams start, winner stays on to face another team, and so on.  So a massive advantage for whoever enters last.  The opponents here are pretty much a parade of mid carders – the unbeaten Wyatt Family are notably absent, but it would be folly to do Wyatts/Shield, a heel-heel match, with no build.  And so it would be folly to enter them in the qualifying match and throw away their winning streak for nothing.

Since the Shield are heels, the match kind of has to be won by a babyface team.  That eliminates the Real Americans and the comedy jobbers 3MB.  Tons of Funk are an undercard novelty act and I can’t see them winning.  The Usos are fine but we’ve seen that match before – though I could buy them getting another shot.  The Prime Time Players are something of a wild card.  They suddenly and without explanation started wrestling as babyfaces after Darren Young came out as gay.  I’m not sure the WWE creative team knows quite what to do with them – I get the sense that there’s a feeling they ought to be pushed but given their heel gimmick, nobody’s quite sure how that would work.  If somebody’s determined to put a rocket under them, a win over the Shield (and a resulting feud with the McMahons) would work.  But it’s much more likely that they get to put up an impressive fight and then lose to the Shield with the excuse of having fought earlier in the night.

6.  WWE United States Title: Dean Ambrose (c) v Dolph Ziggler.  The other member of the Shield will defend his title against Dolph Ziggler, who seems to be going through another phase of being out of favour for some reason.  This seems to happen from time to time, but Ziggler was being groomed as a top babyface only very recently, and at a time when the company really needs top babyfaces, he’s now started losing on syndicated shows.  This doesn’t seem the best possible use of him.  At any rate, this gets him on the card, and I expect him to lose in short order.

Worth getting?  Depends how keen you are to see that Orton/Bryan match and the Punk/Heyman angle, because the rest wouldn’t be out of place on Raw.  Still, the main event should be very good.