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WWE WrestleMania 34: Results, Highlights, Analysis, and Grades

By Bryan Heaton

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Photo Source: WWE.com

WWE Championship Match

AJ Styles (c) vs. Shinsuke Nakamura

Result: AJ Styles defeated Shinsuke Nakamura via pinfall

Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

As much hype as there was surrounding this match, Nakamura’s entrance got everyone even more excited. Nita Strauss, guitarist for Alice Cooper, played The King of Strong Style down ti the ring, along with a bunch of violinists lining the ramp. It was pretty rad, and a nice compliment to Lzzy Hale playing Ember Moon out at TakeOver.

And once the match got started, it started fast and furious with a lot of emotion behind every move. Nakamura was in control early, but things took a shift towards Styles before too long. In fact, for the first 15 minutes or so, things went back and forth quite a bit, with each superstar taking quite a bit of punishment.

Nakamura took the brunt, with his knee being the target. Makes sense – his finisher is a knee strike, after all. It came into play when Nak went for a suplex, but couldn’t support AJ’s weight and buckled – leading Styles to cinch in the Calf Crusher for an extended time.

My issue with this match was that it never really seemed to fully get to its climax. It was structured very much like a New Japan main event – for those who don’t watch, they’re usually long matches with slow builds to a big finish. This one was only about 20 minutes – not super long – and it built slowly, but just kind of ended.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it. But we’re six hours into WrestleMania here, there needs to be something big at the end. The whole section starting with Styles attacking the knee, and ending with Styles hitting the Snow Plow (!) was great! But the Styles Clash finish just seemed too abrupt. Both guys kicking out of finishers before that also took away from that being the end.

But after the match, the WWE Universe got that “something big” they were waiting for: NAKAMURA EMBRACING THE HATE AND TURNING ON STYLES. I guess hanging around Nita Strauss (and presumably Alice Cooper) led Nak to realize that there should be No More Mister Nice Guy.

So the reason this match felt so “meh” considering what could have been is that there’s more coming. Excellent.