| It strikes me that they are a little confused as to what to do. It certainly seems like the idea was to build to Orton-Batista at Mania with their natural rivalry and history. It's one of the only potentially massive Smackdown possible matches, so they seemed to be giving it the slow build.
Now they're in a position where this is in jeopardy because Big Dave has a hell of an injury. It's my guess (pure guess) that they would have had a heel Orton take the belt off him at Mania to finish on exactly a year of holding it (even though Mania isn't the usual place for heels to win), but now they are in a quandry. Logically, they would be looking for a heel to win it and maybe to injure Batista in the process so he could finally heel up his injury.
Now ideally that would be Orton....but he's stuck in a never ending feud with The Taker and also they won't ideally want to put Orton over Batista and have this match in the 3/4 months lead up to Mania since they are obviously trying to hold it off.
So what other heel could you put it on? JBL....Booker T (currently in long term US Title programme) there really isn't much of a choice. Also bear in mind that if this heel is to injure Big Dave for the two months rehabilitation he needs....well Dave is going to come after him when he returns in Jan/Feb which is very close to the build they will want for the Orton feud.
It's a real pickle this one!! |