WWE Royal Rumble 2018: Star Ratings For All 6 Matches

6. AJ Styles Vs. Kevin Owens & Sami Zayn - WWE Championship 2-On-1 Handicap Match

Better than it could have been.

That's a sentence we probably shouldn't be writing, given the immense talent of all three men involved - but we are where we are, and we are on the SmackDown brand circa 2018.

The knock endured by Kevin Owens was obviously unfortunate for him, but in an insensitive take - it's either this, or receive him as a geek - it at least made coherent the match layout, in which Owens and Sami Zayn were almost comprehensively out-wrestled and outwitted by one man. Owens and Zayn were too entertaining in the role to concern ourselves with hysterical protests of burials and the like, and the layout allowed Styles to showcase his almost peerless brilliance - but really, this was a slight disappointment, even if, thankfully, it did not masquerade as a Shane McMahon ego stroke.

The monkey flip reversal into a hurricanrana spot was exactly the sort of sequence that elevates Styles into the echelon of the greats - just great strategy fused with crowd-popping theatrics. It's little wonder that Styles is the unanimous choice of old and new school fans alike as the best wrestler in - at least - North America. Watching him is just exhilarating - and this was Styles mostly unencumbered by road agent stupidity.

It was all a bit easy for Styles in the end, and at the start, it was all a bit slow in the going. The initial crawling pace seemed to foreshadow something epic that did not materialise.

Star Rating: ***1/2