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A week after Punk broke the fourth wall and the WWE is trying its best to keep the ball rolling by having Cena confront Vince McMahon and style it in a shoot way that both men just couldn’t pull off. Still you have to give them points for trying. It is a shame that unlike last week however the WWE decided to air the whole thing on each show so we saw the same thing over and over again until I thought my eyes were going to melt. The good news is though that the WWE are clearly behind this new angle and perhaps at the very least we will get an entertaining match out of the whole thing. I’m guessing that the Chicago crowd will be very much like the ECW One Night Stand crowd were when RVD won the title from Cena, and hopefully that crowd turning magic will help Punk in the same way, I doubt it somehow but we can always live in hope. Anyway enough senseless daydreaming, let’s get on with the report…

Weekly Top Ten:

1st Place: The Miz (10/10)

Another loss against his former bag boy, Alex Riley, still the Miz makes up for it with a huge attack on him after their match. The Miz definitely needs a big win to get back into the main event picture, unfortunately I highly doubt this win will come at MitB. More likely he will be feuding with Riley untl Summerslam and won’t get into the title picture for awhile. That is unless he gets his own surprise face turn in the near future of course, but that isn’t exactly likely to happen.

2nd Place: Sheamus (9/10)

Coming in second this week is the Celtic Warrior. He may have lost to Orton via disqualification on Smackdown, but he certainly is still on a tear as of late and could realistically win the Smackdown MitB match and cash in the briefcase like he said. Whether or not this happens it is clear that the company is still high on the pasty Irish former champion and the future looks bright, now if only he could find another face opponent who isn’t Randy Orton.

3rd Place: Cody Rhodes (8/10)

A bronze for the man with the paper bags. Running interference to help win his Priceless tag match against Daniel Bryan and Ezekiel Jackson gets him the points. I can’t wait to see Rhodes try to put a paper bag over Jackson’s head, doesn’t seem likely to happen. Rhodes has to be a favourite to win the Smackdown MitB ladder match as he has a huge upside and is in with the company. The only question is whether the company actually feels like Rhodes is ready for a title run. I wouldn’t mind seeing Rhodes take the title, somehow injure Orton so that he has a few months to build up a reputation as champion, and then have Orton come back to see how far he has come in squaring off once again against his former mentor. It would be another version of the whole Miz vs. Cena rivalry.

4th Place: Wade Barrett (7/10)

Another potential winner of Money in the Bank is the distinguished English gent; Wade Barrett. Barrett has a tremendous future and honestly wouldn’t look bad with the title even at this early stage in his WWE career. The company seems to have hesitation with Barrett however as they didn’t allow him to win the title last year and they didn’t even set him up with a high profile match this week. Barrett instead had the first no-name squash match on Superstars for a long time. Still a win is a win and Barrett is one of the few guys to get a clean one this week and so he comes away with seven points.

5th Place: Alberto Del Rio (6/10)

The man of destiny won his match on Raw to face Cena for the WWE championship, but after the end of Raw that seems to be null and void. Surely though this win is a foreshadowing of Del Rio and Cena’s upcoming rivalry, which makes me think that Punk is indeed going to lose at MitB so that Cena can go on to face Del Rio at Summerslam. The only way that isn’t what is going down is if the whole thing is a swerve.

6th Place: Jack Swagger (5/10)

The All-American American gets some short time in the limelight on the 4th of July by defeating Sgt. Slaughter. Soon though his moment was ruined by the pint-sized Evan Bourne. This whole Bourne-Swagger situation reminds me of a scaled up version of the Chavo-Hornswaggle feud over a year ago where someone in creative seems to find it funny to have the big guy get embarrassed by the littler guy on a weekly basis, with neither really gaining all that much from the experience because the wins seem arbitrary and the spots pointless.

7th Place: Ted DiBiase (4/10)

The Priceless Prince is finally starting to win matches again since teaming up once again with his former Legacy partner; Cody Rhodes. Still he didn’t manage to earn a place in the Smackdown MitB ladder match so I’m guessing he won’t be appearing on the Money in the Bank PPV card. It’s a shame that the WWE seem to under-utilised DiBiase as he seems to have enough talent to go far in the business. Sure he’s had a few good matches, but the company seems hesitant to put him in any big match situations, and I still can’t for the life of me figure out why that is.

8th Place: Alicia Fox (3/10)

The hip-swaying hottie that is Alicia Fox managed to impress this week, putting on a decent divas match on Superstars with Natalya and what’s more she actually managed to come out on the winning end. Alicia certainly has the looks of a diva and some in-ring talent and as long as she can keep herself together and avoid any major botches in the near future she just might…oh wait there is basically nowhere to go in the divas division at the moment since heels only get handed the title so that the big face divas can take it away from them when they appear in one lads mag or another. Boring.

9th Place: R-Truth (2/10)

The joke has stopped being funny and R-Truth is quickly becoming redundant once again in his new gimmick of the paranoid maniac. As I’ve been saying I highly doubt that Truth will find his way back to the main event for some time to come, and now I can’t really see who he’s going to feud with in the meantime to keep his profile up. More likely he will just be carted out every week to go on about conspiracies and then be jobbed out to whoever the WWE actually wants to promote. This is the problem with having too many decent heels and not enough faces in the company, eventually you are going to get all your talent piling up and some wrestlers are going to miss out on opportunities no matter how good they are, how over they are with the crowd, or how much potential their character has.

10th Place: Dolph Ziggler (1/10)

The final place on the chart is far from perfection, but the US champ didn’t wrestle on his special day and nearly got kicked in the face for his trouble so there is little place else for him to be. I like that Ziggler at least referenced his and Kofi’s feud last year rather than acting like it didn’t happen, which the WWE have a tendency to do. Still the whole thing just reeks of how neither man has really moved on in a whole year despite their obvious potential. This is why the WWE branching into films and TV shows is a good thing because hopefully these shows and movies will be a place for the older stars in the WWE to go so that other guys like Ziggler and Kingston, who are usually left waiting in the wings, will get their chance to perform in the main event for a sustained amount of time.

2011-2012 Season Top Ten: Overall Top Ten:

1st Place: R-Truth (96/140) – 1st Place: C.M. Punk (627/1140)

2nd Place: The Miz (80/140) – 2nd Place: The Miz (624/1140)

3rd Place: Cody Rhodes (66/140) – 3rd Place: Chris Jericho (564/1140)

4th Place: Alberto Del Rio (62/140) – 4th Place: Jack Swagger (343/1140)

5th Place: C.M. Punk (49/140) – 5th Place: Dolph Ziggler (306/1140)

6th Place: Sheamus (44/140) – 6th Place: Cody Rhodes (303/1140)

7th Place: Wade Barrett (43/140) – 7th Place: Sheamus (289/1140)

8th Place: Michael Cole (43/140) – 8th Place: Alberto Del Rio (257/1140)

9th Place: Jack Swagger (35/140) – 9th Place: Wade Barrett (246/1140)

10th Place: Christian (31/140) – 10th Place: Randy Orton (224/1140)

Weekly Filler:

The Face-Off: Cena’s Speech on Raw

Now sure we needed something like this to move the storyline along but the fact is that Cena makes everything so cheesy that it just ruins any element of reality that Punk has tried to bring to the situation. Everything he said was so scripted and when he gets ‘gosh darn mad’ it is just so infuriating because it’s like spoof. He is such a pantomime actor, and yes you could argue that this is good for the kids watching, but who cares! Most wrestling fans will agree that they want a product that feels more real and that is what Punk’s promo was like, whereas Cena’s promo was just the pomp and fakery that we are all sick of, and yet he is still being pushed as the face of the company, despite the reaction that Punk’s promo has garnered.

Face the Facts: Ryder as Face

Still at least the WWE has taken notice to one thing going on in the current climate, and that is that Zack Ryder is too popular to be a heel anymore and had to be turned into a face. Hell Ryder even said as much on his own Youtube show. Well for once Ryder actually got his wish in the form of a quick roll up victory against Drew McIntyre. Ryder has been very successful in his social networking to promote himself within the company considering that the WWE seem to be constantly set against fan opinion, especially the opinions of those who are on the dreaded internet, which really makes no sense to me. Clearly the next generation of wrestling fans will be even more internet savvy than I am and most of what will be viewed and discussed will be online. I think instead of targeting those on the internet as the people that the company seem to hate, I think what they actually mean is those fans that are interested in wrestling enough to go outside of the WWE and see what else is out there, which is clearly a threat to the company’s dominance. Still can the WWE really be that afraid of generating competition, it really does seem like Vince McMahon has the attitude of being burnt once and not wanting it to happen again, blissfully forgetting that it was in that being beaten that his company then rose to the highest heights that it ever saw, thus proving that a little competition is good for all of us.

On the Rise: Punk Title Match

The one good thing that came out of Cena’s sucky speeches was that now we know that the title match between him and Punk at Money in the Bank is definitely on. Now it’s basically impossible that Punk will leave the company as WWE champion, unless the WWE has some plans for the meaning of titles that we all don’t know about. But if Punk does resign with the company I’d bet that he actually manages to win the title against Cena, sending the company into a mock terror with its main star gone and its champion AWOL. But that is just the type of mock shake up that the company needs, it will be like the invasion of the Nexus last year only less tame and toned down for the kids. It’s unlikely I know but anything is possible in the WWE, and if can’t hope for the impossible then what is the point?

Flat-Footed: Joker Sting

No, just no. This whole ‘Sting is mental’ thing is starting to get ridiculous…correction this ‘Sting is mental’ thing has been ridiculous from the beginning, mainly because barely anything occurred to make it happen. TNA/Impact really has to start making some long term decisions because right now they are playing it by ear and it looks shoddy as hell. Just look at Rob Terry, apparently leaving Immortal and going back to the British Invasion despite the group backstabbing him before and all three men being split in their heel/face alignment as little as a month ago. Now Sting is the Clown Prince of Crime apparently, it’s just stupid and perhaps could have been done a lot better if only TNA/Impact actually planned out what they were going to do ahead of time, but alas that will probably never be the case while Bischoff and Hogan are running the show.

That’s all for this week, I’m looking forward to seeing how things unfold in the coming week, and I’m wondering how they are going to keep everything fresh with C.M. Punk banned from televised broadcasts. Perhaps the WWE were planning to reinstate him this week but this whole thing with GLAD have put them off doing that. Whatever the case we will get our match and I am looking forward to an arena full of people once again rooting for the other guy in a Cena championship match. When will the WWE learn that Cena is much better when he doesn’t have the belt as the kids still love him and us real fans can just about tolerate his annoying presence as long as he is not at the head of the company. Whatever happens in the coming weeks, rest assured I will be here to report it all, this is James Wright signing off.

Source: wrestlingtruth.com