We have a podcast this weekend – that’s just one post down.  And as Al reminds you there, don’t forget to get tickets for our live recording on May 31!

Onwards…  The WWE’s biggest show of the year is coming from New Orleans this year.  If you only buy one wrestling PPV a year, it’s probably this one – although this year things are complicated by its inclusion in the Netflix-style “WWE Network” service, where the cost of a six month subscription compares quite favourably with the cost of buying just this one show.  So if you’re buying this as a PPV in 2014, either you don’t have good enough broadband to access the Network, or you haven’t heard of the Network, or you live abroad.

Or you don’t trust the Network, because it’s not been without its teething issues, and plainly this is going to be its biggest test to date.  Given that they had some buffering problems on NXT arRival (yes, that’s how it was capitalised), you have to wonder.  With the Network clearly positioned as the replacement for PPV in the company’s business model, it’s entirely possible that the big story everyone will be talking about on Monday won’t be the wrestling at all, but the tech issues.

Hulk Hogan is “hosting” the show, whatever that means.  If past PPVs are anything to go by, it probably means he’ll show up for five minutes or so, and some mid card heel will charge at him and get knocked out.

Onto the card, then.

1.  WWE World Heavyweight Title – Triple Threat: Randy Orton © v Batista v TBA.

The third participant will be the winner of…

2.  Daniel Bryan v Triple H.

… so best take these two matches together.

This was not the original plan – not that it’s particularly unusual for the WWE to change plans these days.  Randy Orton has held the WWE Title since October, and unified it with the Smackdown title in December.  He’s a heel champion, aligned with the evil company owners – who are calling themselves The Authority right now.  His reign has gone about as far as it can go anyway, so you’d naturally expect him to lose the title on the biggest show of the year.

Since the company is back to having only one world title, the challenger for this match ought to be the winner of the Royal Rumble battle royal from January.  That was Dave Batista, returning to the company after years of absence.  Supposedly the idea was indeed that the fans would be delighted to see him back and thrilled to see him in the main event.

That didn’t happen.  Instead, the live crowd at the Royal Rumble wanted Daniel Bryan to win.  Bryan wasn’t even in the match – and hadn’t been announced for the match, or even hinted for it – but the crowd expected him anyway.  Bryan is an excellent wrestler and the choice of the hardcore fans.  They see him, not without reason, as having been repeatedly held back by a promotion that doesn’t get his appeal.  A big part of the WWE dynamic these days is the fact that a lot of the audience are watching it, not because they particularly like the company, but because it’s the only large-scale wrestling promotion around.  (Unless you feel like learning Spanish or Japanese, or watching matches without intelligible commentary – and most Anglophone viewers don’t.)

Bryan had a string of main events last year where he was repeatedly screwed out of winning the WWE Title – for which there was no pay off at all.  Again, the original plan seems to have been to shunt him into a mid card feud with the Wyatt Family, but that was hastily dropped when they realised this was a waste of his “Yes! Yes! Yes!” catchphrase, which was starting to catch on in outside sporting events.

The fans at the Royal Rumble – admittedly an unusually hardcore crowd – had somehow convinced themselves that Bryan was going to come through and win the match as a surprise entrant, since that would actually have made some sort of storytelling sense in terms of him finally overcoming the odds.  They were not at all pleased when he turned out not to be in the match, and they turned on the show.  They were especially unhappy about Batista winning, apparently seeing him as a backwards-looking nostalgia act who shouldn’t be in the main event.

While that particular crowd could have been seen as an aberration, it quickly became apparent that other live crowds were, at the very least, not that keen on Batista/Orton as a main event either.  Once the WWE decided to accept that reality, they had to turn Batista heel, and add another babyface to the match.  And bluntly, Daniel Bryan was the only wrestler in a position to take that slot, since the crowd want to see him there, and he has a ready-made – if seemingly unintentional – story to build to it.

Unfortunately, by the time they made that call, Bryan was already plugged into a match with Triple H, the largely retired wrestler turned evil management figure – which similarly made some sense as the pay-off for months of abuse.  This too was apparently a last minute substitution, with Bryan taking a role originally reserved for CM Punk (who reportedly became so fed up with the standard of writing these days that he walked out and went home, despite being under contract).

There is of course another way of looking at these events, if you give the company a lot more credit, which is that they’ve brilliantly manipulated the fans over a period of months to make them root for Bryan as a genuine underdog figure whom even the writers are against.  Even if that is the reality, whether it’s particularly smart is another matter; is it necessarily a good thing to convince the fans that you might put on badly written shows that they don’t want to watch?  Maybe, if the pay-off is strong enough, but it would be a big risk.

At any rate, the result is that Daniel Bryan will still be wrestling Triple H, but the winner will advance to join the title match later in the show.

It’s not hard to predict the winner here.  Bryan has to beat Triple H; anything else would be sheer madness and would result in the crowd turning on the main event.  If they do that they’ve genuinely lost their minds and have decided to bait the crowd instead of entertaining them.  He also pretty much has to win the title – it’s the biggest event they could have coming out of this show given the rest of the card, and the only result that the audience is likely to accept.

But there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being predictable.  Everyone knows an action movie ends with the hero winning, everyone knows a romantic comedy ends with the couple getting together.  The trick is to make the journey entertaining enough that people suspend their disbelief.  And these should be good matches.  Okay, Batista’s rusty, but the others are all in the good to great range.  Two good matches with Bryan overcoming the odds and winning is what people want to see and what the company almost has to provide, given where the story has come to.  Only the nagging feeling that they might do something incredibly stupid leads me to even contemplate another possibility.

3.  The Undertaker v Brock Lesnar.

The Undertaker’s undefeated streak at Wrestlemania was originally a matter of coincidence in the booking, but later became a main attraction in its own right.  Beginning in 1991, he has won all 21 of his matches at Wrestlemania, and now emerges from retirement each year for one more match to keep his streak alive.  (If you’re wondering why it’s only 21, he missed the 1994 and 2000 shows due to injury.)

Many argue that at this point there’s no point ever breaking the streak; they say fans don’t want to see it, and it’s worth more intact.  Others – and I’m among them – would say that if you have the right opponent, it could be a great torch-passing moment and the way to cement a rising star in the main event picture.

But you’ve got to have the right opponent, and semi-retired Brock Lesnar is not that man.  Undertaker will win.  It’ll be a brawl, and to be honest I’m not that interested in it.

4.  John Cena v Bray Wyatt.

This is an attempt to make a new star, and probably the best way of using John Cena on a Wrestlemania show.  As one of the company’s biggest stars, he’s not going anywhere; but he does need fresh opponents.  Bray Wyatt and his Wyatt Family stable were brought up from NXT a few months ago, and their Southern Gothic cult gimmick has worked well.  Admittedly, Wyatt’s first couple of PPV matches were ropey, but he had a much better match with Daniel Bryan in January and the Shield in February, so we seem to be back on track.

The feud here is essentially the Wyatts trying to psychologically break Cena, and the suggestion that they might actually be succeeding.  No doubt Cena prevails in the end, but Wrestlemania isn’t the place; Wyatt needs a convincing win first, and beating the company’s biggest star babyface on the biggest show of the year will help him far more than it hurts Cena.

5.  The Shield (Dean Ambrose, Roman Reigns & Seth Rollins) v Kane & The New Age Outlaws (Road Dogg & Billy Gunn).

The Shield, previously henchthugs of the Authority, have lost patience with management.  Where they seemed to be heading for a break-up, instead all three have turned babyface together.  The long term plan is still apparently to have Roman Reigns as the solo star, but it does make more sense to give the Shield a short face run first before detonating the stable.  Here, they’re facing three other Authority enforcers – Kane and Triple H’s old 90s buddies from D-Generation X – in a match that feels like it exists largely because the Shield needed to be on the show.  The Shield will win.  The match should be okay, but given their opponents and the fact that they’re some way from the top of the card, I’m not expecting it to be one of their best six-mans.

6.   Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal: Dolph Ziggler v Big E v Fandango v Alberto Del Rio v Damien Sandow v Titus O’Neil v Christian v Sheamus v Big Show v Mark Henry v Heath Slater v Jinder Mahal v Drew McIntyre v Cody Rhodes v Goldust v Kofi Kingston v The Miz v Brodus Clay v Darren Young v Justin Gabriel v Rey Mysterio v R-Truth v Santino Marella v The Great Khali v Zack Ryder v Sin Cara v Brad Maddox v ? v ? v ?.

Brought to you in association with the WWE Human Resources Department.  Traditionally Wrestlemania has the highest pay-days of the year, and while the advent of the Network confuses things a bit, there’s still a general expectation that that will be the case.  So the company likes to find an excuse to get everyone on the show.

Hence this 30-man battle royal, in which everyone who has nothing better to do will fight for a statue of Andre the Giant.  Battle royals are almost always terrible because there’s nothing you can do in a ring full of thirty people.  But they’ve pushed this enough on television that they have to give the win to somebody who’s going to be pushed heavily.  I wouldn’t be completely shocked if it’s Alexander Rusev, who’s being built up for a debut, and who could still be in one of the three vacant slots.

7.   Divas Championship: AJ Lee © v Natalya Kidd v Alicia Fox v Layla El v Nikki Bella v Brie Bella v Naomi Knight v Cameron Lynne v Eva Marie v Emma v Summer Rae v Aksana v Rosa Mendes v Tamina Snuka.

And here’s the equivalent match for female employees – AJ Lee defending the women’s title in a 14-way match.  First fall decides it.  This is going to be a complete mess, because in logical terms, that match can’t end until 12 people are so incapacitated that they can’t even break up a pin.  But something tells me they’re not giving the women the amount of time that that epic battle would require, and frankly, given the deeply erratic talent levels in this match, it’s probably not something we’d want to watch anyway.  My guess is that AJ retains, simply because there’s just no point in having somebody beat her in such a screwy match – in fact, there’s a decided risk of turning her babyface just by stacking the odds against her so blatantly.  A disputed pin to set up a slightly saner rematch would also be a viable option.

8.  WWE Tag Team Titles – Four-way match: The Usos (Jey Uso & Jimmy Uso) © v Los Matadores (Diego & Fernando) v The Real Americans (Jack Swagger & Cesaro) v Rybaxel (Ryback & Curtis Axel).

This is airing on the pre-show, which would normally mean a routine warm-up match.  But with the Wrestlemania one-hour pre-show having a one-hour pre-show of its own, there’s a lot of time to kill here, and it can’t do any harm to have a strong match to persuade any last-minute waverers to order the PPV.  The Network makes that less of a factor than in previous years, but it’s a factor still.

All four team will no doubt be trying hard to impress, but Rybaxel are mired in the mid card and shouldn’t win here.  Los Matadores are basically a novelty act, and ditto.  The Real Americans are heading towards a break-up with Cesaro in the babyface role; if they win here, it’s going to be a short and implosive reign, but there’s something to be said for that, to give a little more attention to their angle.  My best bet, though, is that the Real Americans screw up through miscommunication to further their story, and the Usos retain in a solid match.

Worth getting?  It’s Wrestlemania.  It’s much lighter on the big celebrity names than some years, and much lighter on gimmicks.  And it has two wretched-sounding matches designed to get everyone on the card.  But pretty much everything else here ought to be good to great, and if they get the Daniel Bryan stuff right – which shouldn’t be hard – then it should be a great moment for his fans.