5 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE WrestleMania Backlash 2022

4. Legendary Wrestlers Deliver Average Bout

Edge AJ Styles
WWE.com

If you were looking at the Edge/AJ Styles match dispassionately, there really wasn’t anything wrong with it.

However, when you consider that Edge is a WWE Hall-of-Famer and Styles is still considered one of the best in-ring performers in the world, this match was just perfectly average. The bulk of the match saw Edge target AJ’s already-injured shoulder, attacking it repeatedly but not really factoring directly into the finish (via crossface).

With Styles spending a good chunk of the match writhing in pain, we didn’t get a lot of counter wrestling or great action, just a lot of targeted offense from Edge. And then we got the interference at the end, which served its purpose nicely, but after 10+ minutes of working a body part, it was hardly a worthwhile payoff.

Let’s just hope we move to a tag match involving Damian Priest and Finn Balor next, and the action ramps up a bit.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.