WWE Smackdown Review - Friday 23rd January 2009

With it being the last Smackdown before the Rumble it was time for the Smackdown crew to hype the Royal Rumble as much as possible but did they manage to get the fans excited about it.

Good Points

Edge doing his best

Edge is doing his best without the champion on the show to build their match at the Rumble with him still maintaining that he had nothing to do with all the incidents that have happened to Jeff Hardy. He then did the only thing he could do without Jeff there and that was wrestle his brother as Matt came to stand up for his brother.

Great Tag Team match

Was great to see both sets of tag champs Miz/Morrison and Carlito/Primo go at it. These two teams are the tag team division for the whole of the WWE and I wouldn’t mind seeing them go at it on a PPV.

Bad Points

Use of Jeff Hardy

Jeff hasn’t wrestled on Smackdown for age and has barely appeared in the arena. This week they did a pre-recorded interview with Jeff which I think would have made more sense to do in the ring. I know they are trying to do something different with Jeff but if the fans can’t see him they are not going to be able to get behind him.

The Triple H storyline

This week HHH ended up wrestling Kozlov and the Big Show in a handicap match after a streak of upsetting the odds he lost. However because there was no build up on the show for the match it had no heat whatsoever and had diddly squat to do with the PPV. Your last segment before a PPV should always be about promoting a match at the PPV which this show didn’t do.

Overall

Like Raw no promotion for the actual Rumble match itself but to add to it Smackdown have a poorly developed build for their title fight. My reckoning is that we may see the return of Christian at the Rumble as the man behind all these attacks to Hardy but we will have to wait and see.