8 Ups & 3 Downs From Last Night's WWE SmackDown (Mar 20)
3. It's Still Good, It's Still Good...It's Gone
Due to reasons which will become obvious very shortly, AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura had a rather inconsequential week on SmackDown Live!, with their interactions confined to another terse in-ring stand off and sarcastic backstage exchange.
Just minutes before some incredibly big news broke ahead of the show, the main story going into SmackDown Live! was the health and wellbeing of AJ Styles after knee injury concerns emerged coming out of the weekend house show loop. His participation was thus entirely non-physical, deliberately delaying his rescue of a beaten down 'King Of Strong Style' so not to get hurt before Nakamura managed to save himself anyway.
So what of the perpetrators Rusev and Aiden English? 'The Bulgarian Brute' painted another mini-masterpiece with 'The Artist', and loud 'Rusev Day' chants were still audible as always, but both look destined for spots in the Andre The Giant Battle Royal. Rusev deserves so, so much better, of course. But he doesn't look likely to get it when the spiritual originator of his support base has made such an unexpected return...