The WWE’s final pay-per-view before Wrestlemania used to be something of an awkward schedule filler, but in the last few years it’s been somewhat strengthened.  Having two versions of the world title helps here, even if it’s counterproductive more generally.  The Royal Rumble show in January determines one of the challengers for Wrestlemania; that leaves the February show with the job of deciding on the other challenger.  Throw in the two obligatory title defences, and when this show ends, the company should have identified both champions and both challengers for the biggest show of the year.

The problem this year is that the viable candidates are few in number, so unless they throw in a major curveball, it’s really quite easy to predict who wins.  Fortunately for me, this show is not a PPV in the UK, so I don’t have to worry too much about that.  (Incidentally, I’m going to be out of the country for Wrestlemania itself, so you won’t be getting a preview for that.)

The Elimination Chamber is a glorified cage match.  Six participants.  Two men start, and every five minutes, another wrestler enters (or, more accurately, is released from their pod inside the cage so that they can join the match).  Elimination occurs by pinfall or submission.  Last guy left is the winner.

Last month’s Royal Rumble match, as widely predicted, was won by Alberto Del Rio, a rising heel on Smackdown who’s evidently being promoted to a main event role.  He’s already declared his intention to challenge for the World Heavyweight Title – the Smackdown title, in other words.  Edge is the current champion, but once again the title is being defended in a Chamber match on this show, so he won’t necessarily still have the belt at Wrestlemania. (Except he almost certainly will, for reasons I’ll come to.)  I can’t help thinking this is a bad way of doing things; the build for Wrestlemania would be much more effective if they just locked in Edge/Del Rio in January, without the complication of having five other challengers floating around.  But the company wants two Chamber matches on this show, and this is the result.

Over on Raw, things are simpler.  The Miz is the heel champion.  He’ll defend in a regular match (which he’s almost certain to win).  And another Chamber match will decide the challenger for Wrestlemania.

Complicated!  But, as we’ll see, also fairly predictable.

1.  World Heavyweight Title, Elimination Chamber: Edge v. Wade Barrett v. Kane v. Drew Macintyre v. Rey Mysterio v. ???.   The build for this match has been decidedly lacklustre.  The actual focus of storylines for the last couple of months has been a feud between Edge and midcard heel Dolph Ziggler.  Clumsy execution aside, the basic idea went like this.  Smackdown’s general manager Teddy Long is attacked by parties unknown.  While he’s recovering, his deputy Vickie Guerrero takes over and promptly shoves her boyfriend Dolph to the top of the card, desperately trying to come up with some sort of match that he can actually win against Edge – which mainly involves banning Edge’s signature moves, declaring that the title can change hands on a disqualification, and having the title defended in ludicrous intergender tag matches.  You can see what they’re trying for, but the overall effect of this kind of thing is to devalue the title.

Anyway, Vickie finally managed to get the title onto Dolph on a technicality at the start of the week, only for Teddy Long to return, order a rematch under normal rules which Edge won handily, and boot Dolph out of the company.  Now, Dolph was supposed to be the sixth man in this match (which begs the further question of quite why it mattered whether he or Edge held the title going in, but let’s pretend we haven’t spotted that issue), and nothing has been announced about his replacement.  The WWE website simply shrugs its shoulders and declares that it’s “reasonable to assume” that the match will now have five men.  Believe that if you will.

So to recap: they’ve spent two months on a feud between Edge and a guy who isn’t in the match.  They’ve also been laying the groundwork for Edge/Del Rio, which seems to guarantee that Edge is retaining here.  In any event, since Del Rio is a heel challenger, the defending champion pretty much has to be a babyface.  That rules out Barrett and McIntyre and probably Kane (who can work in an antihero role, but whose run as champion a few months ago was so lousy that they’re unlikely to want him in the main event at Wrestlemania).  Mysterio/Del Rio would technically make sense, but they’ve done that feud on television already.  Edge it is, then.

Who do they put in the final slot?  My guess would be that Ziggler inveigles his way back into the match somehow.  There’s no real point chucking in a random midcarder, nor wasting the return of a big name without proper promotion.  If they do add somebody completely new, the least-worst option is probably Ezekiel Jackson, simply on the logic that he and Barrett are both members of the Corre group, and something could be done with that in story terms.

It’ll probably be a decent enough match, but it faces the difficulty that only one outcome is really conceivable.

2.  WWE Title: The Miz v. Jerry Lawler. This is more unusual.  Miz is the defending heel champion; most of the other Raw main eventers are in the Chamber match.  That leaves him to face the unlikely challenge of 61-year-old commentator Jerry Lawler.  The idea of Lawler winning the match and going on to defend at Wrestlemania is patently not on the cards, but the question here is really about what they do instead.

Oddly enough, the match itself will probably be good.  Even in his prime, Lawler was never one for the gymnastics.  He was a storyteller, and we’ve seen in his occasional TV matches that he still knows how to tell a good story.  With some willing suspension of disbelief and a bit of goodwill – something Lawler has in vast quantities – the match will probably be very good.

The wider purpose of this match is probably to advance Lawler’s feud with fellow commentator Michael Cole, who by this point is a full blown heel.  Supposedly this is heading to some sort of climax at Wrestlemania (though quite how they resolve it without removing Cole from the announce team, it’s hard to see).  Cole is openly aligned with Miz, so the likely finish here sees Cole interfering to set up some sort of announcer-versus-announcer match at Wrestlemania.  Strange as it sounds, I’m quite looking forward to this.

3.  WWE Title #1 contender, Elimination Chamber: John Cena v. John Morrison v. R-Truth v. Randy Orton v. Sheamus v. CM Punk. On paper, four of these guys are plausible main eventers for Wrestlemania; Morrison arguably ought to be elevated to that level on the card but isn’t there yet; and R-Truth is firmly midcard.  He’s also possibly still in the doghouse after a deeply embarrassing segment on Raw where he danced merrily to the ring and introduced himself to the crowd with a cheerful cry of “What’s up, Green Bay?”, something that didn’t go down terribly well with the watching citizenry of Milwaukee.

Anyway.  The defending champion is a heel, so the winner of this match pretty much needs to be a babyface.  That rules out Sheamus and CM Punk.  The defending champion has also been relatively recently promoted from the midcard, so they’ll want an established babyface star against him.  That rules out Morrison and R-Truth.  As for Miz and Orton, they’ve already had several matches in recent months.

So it’s got to be Cena, really.  The match itself will probably be good, but again, the difficulty may lie in convincing the crowd that the result is in doubt.

4.  Alberto Del Rio v. Kofi Kingston. This is basically a match to get Del Rio on the card, and since he’s going on to Wrestlemania, it’s pretty much guaranteed that he wins clean.  Kingston is the Intercontinental Champion, but that title isn’t on the line here.  That’s probably because the WWE see it as a midcard title, and don’t want Del Rio to be carrying it into the main event at Wrestlemania.  This wasn’t always the case – historically, the IC title was the title which other major wrestlers fought over when Hulk Hogan monopolised the world title – but it’s certainly been true in recent years.  My instinct is that the IC title could use some rehabilitation, but I’d tend to agree that this is not the time for Del Rio to win the belt.  (If he’d had the thing for months, then won his title shot, that would be another matter.)

Ultimately it’s the same story – the match could be good, but does anyone seriously have any doubt about who might win?

5.  WWE Tag Team Titles: Santino Marella & Vladimir Kozlov v. Heath Slater & Justin Gabriel. Likely to be the weakest match on the card, but also one where the outcome is genuinely uncertain.

Marella and Kozlov aren’t very good wrestlers, but they’ve been surprisingly effective in the role of odd-couple tag team champions.  (And Marella’s wrestling is improving, to be fair.)  The heel challengers, Slater and Gabriel, used to be members of the rookie mob Nexus, and are now half of the Smackdown faction the Corre – mostly comprised of Nexus members who were exiled after CM Punk seized control of the group and turned it into a mind control cult.  Slater and Gabriel were the only two members who had the common sense to walk out on CM Punk and, since Gabriel is a decent high-flyer, they have some long-term potential as babyfaces.

Now.  The tag team titles, let us remember, can be important for storyline purposes, because the champions get to appear on both Raw and Smackdown.  And one possibility that’s been talked about for Wrestlemania is some kind of Nexus vs Corre match.  That’s a heel/heel match, but it does make some storyline sense, and the current Nexus are so insane that the Corre would be in a position to play babyfaces by default.  Since Nexus are on Raw and Corre are on Smackdown, the tag titles provide a potential justification for bringing them back into contact (though admittedly the company’s generally quite lax about maintaining the brand division in the run-up to Wrestlemania).

The Corre could use a big win, and Slater and Gabriel particularly so.  I’d be inclined to have them win for that reason alone.  Actually, there’s a potentially decent story to tell by having Nexus and Corre as feuding heel groups, with Marella and Kozlov caught in the middle trying to get their titles back.  I’d quite like to see that.  The other way forward is that the babyface champions retain following uninvited interference from Nexus, and you set up the Nexus/Corre feud that way.  That’s okay, but doesn’t really solve the problem of how to give the Corre more credibility.

My guess would be that the heels win, if only because they need the win so badly, but neither result would surprise me.

Worth getting? Well, the results are largely predictable, but the overall match quality should be decent.  Depends how bothered you are about knowing where things are going.