Robert Burns was right

The fabled poet wrote that "the best laid plans of mice & men often go astray". That certainly holds true in the WWE.

Just 9 days ago, at The Bash PPV, Edge & Chris Jericho were inserted into a tag title match between then-champions Primo & Carlito Colon and Legacy (Ted DiBiase, Jr. & Cody Rhodes). The idea being that Smackdown's GM, Theodore Long, was under pressure from his nuttier-than-a-can-of-cashews boss, Vince McMahon, to shake things up for the Friday show. Edge & Jericho won the match and the tag titles, this after Jericho had dropped the Intercontinental title earlier in the evening.

5 days later, at a house show in San Diego, Edge tore his Achilles' tendon in a match vs. old foe Jeff Hardy. Edge had surgery earlier today, and the early estimate is that he's gone until next Spring, perhaps in time for Wrestlemania 26 in Phoenix. Since WWE taped two weeks' worth of television programming last week to accomodate a summer tour of Japan (Smackdown) & Australia (Raw), the company has the luxury of time before the next episode of Raw (July 13) to decide what to do with the tag team championship.

Edge's injury is the latest to plague the WWE. A month ago, Dave Batista had to vacate the WWE title after suffering a torn bicep muscle. Just a couple of weeks later, Matt Hardy was sidelined with a torn abdominal muscle. Hardy has since revealed on his Twitter page that he's actually had the tear since childhood, and it'd gotten progressively worse in recent weeks. Hardy, it's believed, will be gone until late September at the earliest.

What these injuries do to WWE is it hinders whatever long term planning the company had for their television programs. Hardy, for example, had a brief feud with his younger brother, Jeff, earlier this year, and Hardy had just been "traded" from Raw to Smackdown, despite the injury. The thinking, of course, was that they could finish the feud between the two brothers and move on. Similarly, they had just decided to have the only other brother act on the roster, the Colons, split up and feud, but that was before Edge went on the DL, and common sense says that it would be prudent to hold off on that for a while. Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply in the WWE. It will be interesting to see just exactly what WWE intends to do come July 13.