10 "Perfect" Wrestling Feuds That Went Horribly Wrong
6. AJ Styles Vs. Shinsuke Nakamura
The marketing ahead of AJ Styles Vs. Shinsuke Nakamura promised a dream match.
This was amusing because it was WWE effectively saying "These two wrestlers had a great match in New Japan, so here it is again", but it was also credible and too cool a prospect to get cynical over. WWE promised something that hardcore fans wanted, and attempted to deliver it at WrestleMania 34. It was mechanically good if drab, and four years later, it's almost impossible to remember a single thing about it beyond the infamous post-match. It was worked in the dreaded "Get a move on, f*cking hell" WWE rhythm, existed to set up further matches that didn't remotely meet the standard set at Wrestle Kingdom 10, and those matches made AJ Styles look like a complete dipsh*t.
He doesn't exactly seem clever to begin with, so this took some doing.
AJ was smacked in the testes several times, and didn't think to wear a cup. He could have hurt Nakamura's hand if he did. Or he could have thought about what it means to live in the land of the free, one of the two.
The general rule of thumb is thus: when WWE outright say that a wrestling dream match is happening at WrestleMania, more often than not, it is going to be too slow and tedious.