(If you’re here for this weekend’s podcast thread, it’s two posts down.)

And now: notionally, the second-biggest pay-per-view of the WWE year.  Personally, I’ve always thought the Royal Rumble was bigger, but Summerslam has been around longer, so there it is.

I’m rather pushed for time this weekend, so it’s fortunate that the WWE have chosen to help me out by not announcing very many matches.  At time of writing, only four have been officially promoted on TV; a fifth was belatedly added on the web site, though at least it continues from a TV storyline.  And so far, that’s it.  In fairness, that’s partly because some planned undercard matches have been derailed by injuries, but it’s still a card that lacks depth.

1.  WWE Title: John Cena v CM Punk.  On the last show, you may recall, CM Punk was challenging to win Cena’s WWE title in his last night on the company.  Punk had taken on a new voice-of-the-hardcore-fans gimmick which effectively repositioned him as a tweener (that rare breed of wrestler who is intentionally neither a proper babyface nor a proper heel, but somewhere in between).  A well-executed angle and the fact that the last show was in Punk’s home town meant that there was a ton of interest in the match, at least from that hardcore fan base; how much it meant to a wider audience remains the subject of debate.

At any rate, what follows is an incredibly rushed storyline.  Punk and Cena had a very good match, which Punk won after chairman Vince McMahon inadvertently distracted Cena in a botched attempt to help him.  The show ended with Punk evading capture, leaping the rail into the crowd, and escaping with the title as promised.  So far so good.  From there, Vince decided to dubiously treat the title as vacated and held a tournament to crown a replacement champion, which was won by… well, by Rey Mysterio, actually, but that’s a needless complication since Cena immediately won it off him.

Meanwhile, Vince was removed from office by the board of directors and replaced by the retired HHH, who rehired Punk.  So now we’ve got two people claiming to be the WWE Champion, and there’s going to be a unification match.  But HHH has appointed himself as the referee, which effectively means the storyline is now about who he’s going to side with.

All of this could have been drawn out quite happily for months, but it was pretty much rushed through in order to get to the rematch at Summerslam.  Oh, and if it was me, I wouldn’t have given Cena a second title belt.  It’s not that it costs the WWE anything – they have spares of all the title belts – but to my mind, it’s a stronger story if Cena is the paper champion but Punk has the belt.  Minor thing, though.

They had a very good match last month, admittedly helped by a particularly rabid crowd reaction that’s unlikely to be repeated.  I doubt whether adding HHH to the match is going to make it any better; the risk with this sort of thing is that the fans know the match can’t end until he does something to justify his involvement, and so it’s harder to get a reaction in the earlier part of the match.

Quite how you get HHH involved in the finish, I’m not sure.  Since the Nexus has disbanded, there’s no obvious source of outside interference for him to deal with; and neither Cena nor Punk would want his help.  One possibility is that HHH tries to help Cena, the company man, whether Cena likes it or not – which could work if the pay-off is that Punk prevails over the odds to win.

(Bear in mind, Alberto Del Rio is still hanging around with his Money in the Bank title shot.  There’s a pretty good chance of him showing up to claim his match and steal the title from whoever wins, building to that Cena/Del Rio feud that they’ve been meaning to get around to for months.)

2.  World Heavyweight Title: Christian v Randy Orton.  “This again?”, I hear you cry.

Yes.  This again.  For the fourth straight show.  Christian is the paper champion, having won the title last month by disqualification.  Titles don’t normally change hands on a DQ, but Christian conveniently got the rules changed in his contract, so… there we are.  This is Orton’s obligatory rematch.

Christian has been booked consistently as a weak scheming heel throughout this feud, and so it would be very odd if he suddenly managed to pull off a legitimate win now.  If he’s going to retain, it’ll probably be on a screwjob finish.  That said, my suspicion is that they only had Christian win in order to stretch out the feud one more month, what with the desperate lack of plausible challengers on Smackdown.  My bet is that Orton just gets the title back and both guys move on to other feuds.

For all that this feud has been extended beyond its natural lifespan, though, Orton and Christian have been having consistently good matches.  As an individual match, it’ll probably be the best thing on the show.

3.  Divas Title: Kelly Kelly v. Beth Phoenix.  Kelly is the defending champion, Beth is the challenger.  The angle here is that Beth and Natalya are the actual wrestlers who have lost patience with the parade of swimsuit models (such as Kelly) who dominate the women’s division.  With typical WWE logic, this is supposed to make them heels.  In fact, they’re not getting booed, possibly because a lot of the audience would tend to agree that the women’s division could only be improved by hiring more people who can actually bloody wrestle.  This being the start of a major storyline (by women’s division standards), and Kelly being something of a placeholder champion, I would expect Beth to win.

4.  Sheamus v Mark Henry.  A vaguely interesting midcard match from a booking standpoint.  Mark Henry has had a decent few months as a destructive heel on Smackdown, which seemed to suggest that he was being positioned as a future challenger to Randy Orton’s title.  Sheamus is an Irish wrestler who’s had a previous run as a heel champion on Raw, but he’s just been turned babyface with some success.  Given that, you’d expect him to be on a winning streak right now, so chances are he should win this match.  It depends to some extent on the planned title match next month and whether they need a babyface or a heel set up as challenger… but really, they shouldn’t have booked this match in the first place unless Henry was beatable.

As for the match quality, good Mark Henry matches are thin on the ground, so don’t get your hopes up.

5.  Daniel Bryan v Wade Barrett.  This is the match that was added on the website.  Bryan is the Smackdown Money in the Bank winner, which in theory allows him to challenge for the Smackdown title whenever he wants.  Most previous winners have just gone for the ambush approach.  But Bryan’s a babyface, so he’s declared that he’ll cash in his title shot at Wrestlemania 2012 instead.

This is odd, since Bryan is emphatically a midcard wrestler, albeit a hugely talented one, and it’s hard to see the WWE putting him in a major match on the biggest show of the year.  Of course, they’ve got until next spring to build him up, which is perfectly doable.

Or he could just be lying.

Regardless, Bryan needs an opponent to feud with, so here comes Wade Barrett, who was in the main event a year or so back during the Nexus angle, but has now dropped back to the upper midcard while he builds up a bit more experience.  Since Bryan was (very) briefly a member of Nexus, this feud makes sense; Barrett’s dreams of being champion have slipped away, and the runt of the litter seems to be making the running instead.  There’s a story there.  These two could have a good match given time – and since there’s a lot of show to fill, they might well get it.  Who wins depends on whether the idea is to feed a string of opponents to Bryan to build him up (in which case Bryan wins), or to do a feud with Barrett over the next couple of shows (in which case Barrett should win).  Either makes sense.

Worth getting?  Five matches announced, of which three should at least be good – but boy, they might struggle to fill the rest of that show.