For those of you who come here for wrestling posts, I’ll draw your attention to the Chikara post just below, which, to be honest, is probably more interesting than Battleground.  The general consensus is that the WWE hasn’t done a brilliant job of promoting this one, or even giving people a particularly good reason to watch it.  But hey, it’s not a PPV in the UK, so I might as well record it…

1.  WWE Title: Daniel Bryan v Randy Orton.  The WWE Title is currently vacant.  The storyline here is that the evil owners of the company don’t want Daniel Bryan as their champion, because he doesn’t look like their idea of a champion.  In theory this is meant to get us behind him as a plucky underdog who doesn’t give up in the face of overwhelming odds.  That’s fine as far as it goes.

But.  Two shows back, Daniel Bryan beat John Cena clean to win the title.  It was immediately taken off him, by beating him up and then letting Randy Orton cash in his Money in the Bank title shot.  Fine – that’s how Money in the Bank has worked for years.  Bryan got a rematch on the next show.  He won that match too, beating Orton decisively with his finisher – but the referee fast-counted the pin, providing the excuse for Bryan to be stripped of the title the next day.  The obvious implication is that the referee was paid off by management to give them that excuse.  The title has been held up ever since, and now we’re getting the second rematch.

No particularly clear explanation has ever been given for why Bryan is getting this further shot if the company is so desperate to stop him winning, even though it wouldn’t be that hard to justify it – you could rationalise that the company rules entitle him to an automatic rematch on losing the title (which does seem to be the normal rules), and again on the title being held up, and there’s been at least some suggestion that the company is worried that Orton does need to beat Bryan in order for their hand-picked champion to have credibility.  Plan A, in other words, is for Orton to simply win the match, in which case, problem solved.

The problem is that a set-up like this gives the audience no reason to believe that, even if Bryan wins the match, he won’t simply have it taken straight back off him again.  And that kills the match dead.  It’ll be a good match, but it’s also one we saw last month, have seen several times on free TV, and can probably expect to see again in November.  And the heat is really on Bryan versus Management, with Orton serving as an in-ring proxy.  Ratings haven’t been great and it’s always possible the company will just pull the plug on this whole idea and move on to Orton versus Somebody Else – which would pretty much have to be CM Punk by a process of elimination.  More likely, though, this gets dragged out a bit further, in which case Bryan kind of has to win, so that at least we can move on to matches where he’s got the title and management are trying to find somebody who can beat him for it.

2.  CM Punk v Ryback.  Continuing CM Punk’s feud with his former manager Paul Heyman.  Last month, Punk faced Heyman and his current protege Curtis Axel in a two-on-one no-DQ elimination match.  Punk eliminated Axel, so he should have go this hands on Heyman, but Ryback showed up to come to his rescue and beat up Punk so that Heyman could (technically) pin him.  Hence this match.

Pairing Heyman with Ryback makes a degree of sense.  He’s a great manager and Ryback’s been kind of stalled ever since he fought Punk at the tail end of last year and had his winning streak brutally interrupted.  At that point Ryback was a babyface and Punk was a heel, but both have flipped sides since then.  There’s also a nice dynamic with Heyman being thrilled by his new overmuscled protege and blatantly losing interest in the underperforming Axel.  But that’s on a slow burden that shouldn’t play into this show too much.

In the long term this all has to lead to Punk getting his revenge on Heyman, but the story won’t be finishing just yet.  You could get away with either man winning; I suspect they’ll go with Ryback, simply because his pairing with Heyman is new and he needs the win rather more.  The fact that the outcome’s genuinely in doubt is always a plus, but as I recall, their last match wasn’t terribly good; Punk laboured mightily to carry the big lug to a PPV main event, and while the pressure isn’t quite so high here, it can’t go too long if it’s going to play to Ryback’s strengths.

3.  World Heavyweight Title – Hardcore Rules Match: Alberto Del Rio (c) v Rob Van Dam.  A rematch from last month, when Del Rio lost by disqualification.  Since a title only changes hands by pinfall or submission, he’s still the champion.  It says a lot for the prestige of the Smackdown title that the WWE website is listing this match below the non-title, nothing-on-the-line Punk/Ryback match, incidentally.

This is pretty much a holding pattern for both guys, with the hardcore rules stip thrown in to try and attract a bit more interest.  Part of the idea is that the stipulation ought to favour Van Dam, since he made his name in the ECW promotion back in the nineties, where everything was technically a hardcore match.  But Van Dam’s on a short term contract, so if he does win the title, he probably isn’t keeping it for very long.  Most likely, this is a time-filling exercise until they come up with something else for Del Rio to do.  (Unifying away this wholly superfluous second world title would be a start.  The logic for keeping it around used to be that it allowed both versions of the touring show to be headlined by a world title match, but right now this title ranks about on a par with the IC or Tag belts, so why bother with it?  The fact that the company has increasingly been running house shows headlined by non-title matches tends to suggest that they’re less concerned about the issue too.)

It’ll be a perfectly passable match but I don’t expect anything extraordinary.

4.  The Shield (Seth Rollins & Roman Reigns) v Cody Rhodes & Goldust.  There’s a name we haven’t seen on PPV in a while.  Goldust was big in the nineties, when the company was not interested in being PG, and decided it would be a wonderful idea to dress Dustin Rhodes in gold and black, complete with face paint, and position him as a sexually eccentric movie obsessive.  The gimmick was either taken at face value or presented as mind games to mess with his opponents, depending on how sympathetic he was meant to be at any given time.

Goldust and his brother Cody Rhodes are both the children of Dusty Rhodes, who was big in the eighties, and currently has a job down in the WWE’s developmental facility.  He appears occasionally as the authority figure in NXT.

This feud is a spin-off from Daniel Bryan’s storyline, and the phase in which the McMahons were coming down with an enormous hammer on any other wrestlers who stood up for him.  That bit seemed to come to an end when ten (mostly undercard) babyfaces collectively came to Bryan’s aid, and the sky didn’t fall.  I suppose we’re meant to take it that a rebellion by that many people at once called management’s bluff, though frankly nobody ever seemed to bother with explaining it.  By that point, however, Cody Rhodes had already got himself sacked for being vaguely critical of management, and for whatever reason, the McMahons have decided to channel their irritation into feuding with his whole family.

Hence this match, in which Cody and his semi-retired brother will take on the tag team champions.  The Shield have gone from being anarchist rebels to Triple H’s henchmen, again without explanation – though that’s more excusable since there was always a strong implication they were more bothered about grabbing people’s attention than the “justice” they used to blather on about.  However, since Triple H responded to the babyface rebellion by throwing the Shield to the wolves in an 11-on-3 handicap match, they might not be quite as loyal to him as they were last week.

The tag titles are not on the line in this match, but the stipulation is that if the Rhodes brothers win, Cody and Goldust are rehired, but if they lose, Dusty loses his job too.  Smart money is that the Shield win, since Cody is indeed (as mentioned on TV) about to get married, and consequently has time off booked soon.  Goldust looked pretty decent in his one TV match building up to this, and the match should be alright.

5.  WWE Intercontinental Title: Curtis Axel (c) v R-Truth.  Probably just a filler match in which Axel defends his IC title against a more or less random opponent.  R-Truth’s been doing very little for quite some time, so it’d be a surprise for him to win here.  That said, Axel does have a current storyline in which the bloom is off the rose with him and Heyman, so I can see an argument for having him lose his title in an upset to further that story.  I don’t expect much from this, at any rate.

6.  Kofi Kingston v Bray Wyatt.  Wyatt’s PPV debut, facing Kane in a Ring of Fire match, was widely derided as a fiasco, largely because it made bad use of a gimmick that was unworkable to start with.  Fortunately, since it was on PPV, not many people saw it, and the Wyatt Family still seem to be getting good reactions.  This is basically a case of feeding Wyatt a stronger opponent against whom he ought to have a good match.  And Wyatt is good, I’ve seen him in NXT.  This ought to be a short, decent undercard match in which Wyatt can win decisively and make a better impression.

7.  WWE Divas Title: AJ Lee (c) v Brie Bella.  Continuing the feud between heel champion AJ Lee, and literally everyone who is on the Total Divas reality show.  A problem with Total Divas – which doesn’t take place in WWE continuity, but bears about as much resemblance to real life as any other reality show you’ll find on E! – is that it revealed that John Cena and Daniel Bryan were both dating the Bella Twins, who are meant to be mean-girl heels.  Bryan and Brie Bella are now engaged, which causes even more of a problem for the face/heel alignment.  The solution, it seems, is to have AJ feud with the entire show (because she’s jealous of the attention) and thus turn everyone involved babyface, even the Bellas.

And if you’re wondering how AJ can interact with a show that doesn’t take place in the continuity in which she exists… you’re thinking about this a lot harder than the WWE have.

AJ’s had the title for a while; Brie’s just turned babyface and needs momentum; and if she wins, then you can have her and Daniel Bryan both winning titles on the same night.  If she loses, we’re basically back to square one.  So yeah, I’ll go with Brie here.  The match will be the usual short PPV women’s match, probably at the better end of the spectrum.

8.  Pre-show match: Dolph Ziggler v Damien Sandow.  Good lord.  Ziggler seems to be out of favour for some reason, and hasn’t done much of interest in a while.  Sandow holds the Money in the Bank briefcase for the World Heavyweight Title but has barely won a match since.  So it’s a battle of the guys who rarely win.  Less a contest, more a fascinating insight into booking priorities, I suspect Ziggler’s winning here, since he actually wins occasionally and is still presented as a semi-credible upper mid carder, while Sandow’s near-total lack of in-ring success appears to be a story point.  It ought to be okay.

Worth getting?  Well, the wrestling in the main matches should be fine.  But the main event doesn’t work story-wise, and while there’s nothing glaringly awful here, there’s a lot of blatant filler on that undercard.