SmackDown starts with a recap of the events of Survivor Series, with Edge making his return to win the WWE Title.

The show starts with Vickie Guerrero in the ring, and she introduces Edge, who cuts a promo. Boy has this show ever sucked without him. You can tell from Edge and Vickie’s promo work that HHH has been put on the backburner as they concentrated so much on Hardy, and much more on him missing the show than HHH losing the WWE title.

To me that suggests it’ll be Hardy/Edge at the Royal Rumble with HHH’s big babyface title challenge saved for WrestleMania. In other words, it’ll be the predictable order, but the wrong one. Hardy and HHH both run out only to be stopped by security, so Kozlov got in the ring, but before he could attack Edge Vickie announced that tonight there will be three Beat The Clock matches.

The first Beat The Clock match is Jeff Hardy v. The Brian Kendrick. The crowd were really into this one, which you’d expect given that Jeff is clearly the biggest babyface on the brand, yes even moreso than HHH. Hardy going for quick pins at the beginning was a nice touch that paid lip service to the stipulation, but otherwise it was just a regular match, with Kendrick using Ezekiel Jackson for the distraction before taking charge, and Jeff made a great comeback before hitting the swanton to win in 12:13.

Backstage girl interviews Matt Hardy, who says Edge and Vickie were responsible for the attack on Jeff on the day of the PPV, which Edge and Vickie had denied in their show-opening promo.

Maryse, Victoria and Natalya won a six-diva tag match over The Bella Twins and Michelle McCool when miscommunication amongst the babyfaces led to one Bella hitting McCool and Maryse rolling her up for the win. The match was standard diva fare, meaning it was pretty bad, but the heels do all bring something to the match be it personality (Maryse) or decent in-ring work (the other two). McCool was pissed off afterwards, and you can tell by this and how her match with Maria was built up that she’ll be turning heel soon, which probably leads to Gail Kim challenging her coming in as a babyface, which is both a good spot for Gail and will hopefully help McCool improve as a worker if it’s a long-term feud.

The next Beat The Clock match is Vladimir Kozlov v. Matt Hardy. I don’t think they should have booked Matt in this tournament. It’d be fine if he and Jeff were heels, because then he could stall for time and attempt to make the match drag out longer, and Kozlov would be chasing him. They kind of did that, but firstly it didn’t fit Matt’s character, and secondly once they got in the ring they had a competitive match, with Matt bringing the fight to Kozlov, while Kozlov was doing bearhugs and other such wear-down holds. The match ended in a no-contest when the 12:13 time limit expired and Kozlov failed to Beat The Clock.

Jesse & Festus won by DQ over Miz and Morrison when bell-related highjinks left Festus retarded and they kept beating on Jesse on the outside until the referee called the match off. Morrison’s heel stooging and bumping are fantastic, as is his athleticism, and here he got a great evil smile on his face when he rang the bell the first time, which was a major charismatic moment that shows he has potential to be a top line WWE heel that can main event PPVs. I know that seems like a big statement over such a minor thing, but it is stuff like that which separates the midcard-for-life guys from the major players. After the match, I don’t care that it was possibly the most childish kid-oriented segment I’ve seen all year, I fucking loved it - they got the bell and made Festus go retarded again, then Miz stood next to Festus as Morrison rang the bell and then rung it again, so he’d power up for like a second, with Miz doing the same stood right next to him, after Miz and Morrison played around with each other ringing the bell twice so Festus would attack the other for a split second. The crowd chanted “one more time” as they were doing this and good for them I say, since I’d have been chanting that if I was in this crowd too.

Mr Kennedy plugged his straight-to-DVD movie before interviewing HHH, who says he will beat the clock tonight.

The main event is HHH v. Shelton Benjamin in the final Beat The Clock match. Why the fuck is Shelton Benjamin ALWAYS HHH’s opponent in these? I’ve seen this match a million times, they had their usual boring match, with an admittedly interesting and dramatic finish. There was a ref bump, then HHH hit the pedigree, and the ref had to crawl over to make the slow cover, and only made it in time for the match to end at exactly 12:13, tying Jeff’s time and presumably a triple threat match at Armageddon.

The show ended with Jeff and HHH’s staredown. That HHH finish would’ve been fantastic if there wasn’t an Armageddon PPV. If they’d done it for the Rumble, HHH could’ve hit the pedigree after the ref bump, and the ref would get up and do the slow crawl and super-slow selling an injury count, and only get to 2 before the time limit expired.

Mark Bright
mark@ifight365.com