Friday Night SmackDown Review - August 31, 2012

Damien Sandow takes World Champion Sheamus to the limit.

Nice opening segment featuring World Heavyweight Champion Sheamus and Damien Sandow. I've grown tired of seeing Sheamus open the show with a promo, as it's been the same old opening segment for weeks. However, Sandow was a fresh face to kick off the show and his verbal jabs to the Celtic Warrior were entertaining. It set up one of the night's matches nicely and gave Sandow some effective heat.

Solid match between Rey Mysterio and Cody Rhodes. Obviously, we've seen better matches from the two, but this one was pretty good for what it was worth. I didn't like the idea of Rhodes losing clean, as they could've at least had Sin Cara cost him the victory. Sin Cara masking Rhodes following the match furthered the feud, but didn't do anything for this viewer.

Fine match with Kaitlyn and Natalya. The action wasn't terrible, but instead short and sweet. It gave Kaitlyn the victory she needed going into her Divas Championship match at Night of Champions as well as incorporating her recent rivalry with Natalya over social networking. Speaking of Natalya, she deserves much better than this, but it's good she's still being featured on the main shows even if she's on the losing end.

Good match between World Heavyweight Champion Sheamus and Damien Sandow. The action was good while it lasted, but Sandow running in and out of the ring numerous times grew old quickly and made him look cowardly. Sheamus winning via count-out doesn't do anything for either man, as it gives Sandow his first real loss in singles competition while Sheamus continues to dominate for no apparent reason. Nonetheless, I'm glad they made the smart decision to protect Sandow by having him not get pinned here. I understand that Sandow is not yet big enough of a character to upset Sheamus, but then why have this match at all? Strange booking here.

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Randy Orton delivers a picture-perfect suplex to Dolph Ziggler.

Fun tag team match with the Prime Time Players defeating Justin Gabriel and Tyson Kidd. It had reasoning behind it given the brawl that ensued on last week's edition of SmackDown and gave us a nice glimpse of what's to come over the WWE Tag Team Championships. I had no preference to who would win since it's pretty likely at this point that both teams will be given a title shot anyway. For what it's worth, Young's finisher looked cooler than normal here as he put away Kidd.

Decent match between Kane and Alberto Del Rio. Del Rio's promo prior to the contest was merely meaningless since we've had the same thing for weeks, and Kane interrupting didn't make all that much sense. The action was fine for what it was, but nothing I'd been eagerly awaiting a rematch for. Del Rio's victory helped give him momentum going into his eventual World Heavyweight Championship match, while also furthering Kane trying to deal with his anger management. Kane attacking Josh Matthews was a nice touch, but what is all this supposed to be leading to?

Great match with Randy Orton and Dolph Ziggler. These two are absolutely incapable of having a bad match, and there was no exception to that rule here. The two have excellent chemistry, and Ziggler looked strong in defeat. However, I question the move to give Orton the clean victory, where they could've easily had Orton win via disqualification or not even have the match at all. Ziggler losing clean certainly takes away from his credibility, but I hope it leads to something and to a feud with Orton.

Overall, a fine show that had a lot of solid action, but the booking throughout the night was mostly questionable, strange, and just downright bad. They hardly built towards any of the feuds for Night of Champions, which made this edition of SmackDown feel somewhat like a house show given the finishes of the matches that would send a crowd home happy.

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