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Archive for January 26th, 2009

The appeal of the 30-man, one winner match is still a winner after all these years, and this year’s edition played out quite well. With Randy Orton facing a firing by the McMahon Family, he had his bags packed and seemed resigned to his career ending.

To have Orton be the eighth entrant and the last man standing at the end made storyline sense and set him up well to make his WrestleMania main event more meaningful to him than any match he’s ever wrestled. That will mark him as ultra-motivated going into a match against John Cena wherein the outcome might otherwise seem a no-brainer.

Cena-Orton has long been thought to be the headlining main event of the future; well wake up, Bubba, it’s 2009 and the future is now. Better take those Canon cameras to WrestleMania with you, because this clash between these two at the biggest of all PPVs could become the first of many over the next few years.

Everyone was expecting Christian Cage to return to WWE tonight, and this was the match most folks expected it to occur in. So imagine the surprise when not only did Christian not return during this match, but the backstab a former tag partner move came from an unexpected source. It was a storyline so unexpected that it might require a Chicago accident attorney to clean up the mess.

So, what happened? Well, the match between Hardy and Edge was top-notch, but at the critical point in the match, Matt Hardy, fresh off his defeat at the hands of Jack Swagger, showed up and at first it appeared he would be helping his brother Jeff.

Then? The chairshot heard across the WWE as Matt attacked his own brother to turn heel and give Edge the win. Talk about defying expectations? A Matt-Jeff feud could be a huge draw for several PPVs to come!

When a ring vet like JBL is in against a hot headliner like John Cena, the outcome is usually predictable, which is why the secondary story thread of Shawn Michaels being under the employ of JBL was so critical to getting this match over with the audience.

The storyline advanced as Michaels was able to fulfill the technical terms of the contract, super-kicking Cena and putting JBL on top of Cena for the pin, but by superkicking JBL as well, some long-brewing emotional payback was brought to a boil like a bottle of Leptovox in a hot pot, and everyone knows this won’t be the end of it.

One can sense a JBL-Michaels feud match on the slate for WrestleMania, and so the real question mark here is how tonight’s match served to set the table for Cena’s WrestleMania match. Looks like they’ll have to allow a Raw superstar to win the Rumble.

As an opening match to a major pay-per-view, I’ve seen worse than this. A lot worse. While Matt Hardy has always been the more workmanlike of the two Hardy Boyz, he put on a solid show with a promising young talent in reigning ECW champion Jack Swagger tonight.

Swagger, looking like a fellow in need of some Dwarf Little Gem Magnolia trees rather than a head scissors, he makes a credible heel and Hardy’s ring experience helped carry Swagger through in the areas where he lacks.

When Swagger wanted to slow down and mat-wrestle, Hardy would up his tempo and lead the young Swagger through the pacing of the thing. Given that they were only allowed 10 minutes to tell their in-ring story, that was needed.

Swagger retained the title and looked like he achieved something along the way.