10 Fascinating WWE WrestleMania 34 Facts

3. A Wrestle Kingdom Re-match At WrestleMania

ronda rousey triple h wrestlemania 34
WWE.com

It is difficult to put into words how excited fans were about the prospect of AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura at WrestleMania 34. From the moment Nakamura arrived in WWE, there was a constant quiet hope that he'd cross paths with The Phenomenal One somewhere down the line, but even the most optimistic of aficionados didn't expect it to be in a WWE Championship match at WrestleMania.

That is exactly what we got. Just two years and three months after putting an all-time classic at Wrestle Kingdom 10, Nakamura and Styles went at it on the Grandest Stage of Them All. The IWGP Intercontinental Championship was replaced with the WWE Championship. When the bell rang, Shinsuke Nakamura vs. AJ Styles became the first NJPW Wrestle Kingdom match to subsequently happen at WWE WrestleMania.

There is little point in talking about what happened next. Nakamura vs. Styles at WM34 is almost universally remembered as a disappointment, which is as much an indication of the expectations as anything else. The Wrestle Kingdom match still holds up as an all-time classic, why would a WWE version be anywhere near as good? If nothing else, the underwhelming 'Mania match gave us months of Shinsuke strong-styling AJ's balls, a sentence that still brings a chuckle to this writer's eye some three years later.

Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.