AJ Styles' In-Ring Talent Would Be Wasted by Shane McMahon's WrestleMania Match

The worst fears of many a wrestling fan were confirmed in the aftermath of Tuesday's WWE SmackDown. 

The rumors have circulated feverishly for months online that AJ Styles, potentially WWE's hottest in-ring talent right now, was going to be feuding with SmackDown supremo Shane McMahon at WrestleMania 33 next month.

WWE does not do things by accident. And in releasing the video below of McMahon and Styles having to be kept apart by Brian James in a backstage segment following his loss to Randy Orton, the seeds of a feud have been well and truly planted.

In truth, those seeds have been quietly growing under the surface for a couple of weeks, with Styles and McMahon clashing in backstage segments on multiple occasions.

But why? Why is arguably the company's best wrestler going into a feud with, no disrespect to Shane, a 47-year-old part-time wrestler whose last major match was a shambles? Wrestling fans will perhaps only ever remember Shane-O-Mac's leap of faith from the top of the cell against The Undertaker, but the match itself was on the verge of stinking the whole show out.

Don't worry about the quality of the match this year. Styles is so good that he will bring the best out of McMahon when it matters in the ring, even with his limited technical and physical ability inside the ring.

But the real underlying issue here is how WWE has managed to get a guy who practically held the company up for a whole year—and made SmackDown the No. 1 show on WWE TV—into a feud very few people are invested in. Even the Twitter community have voiced their discontent:

Styles should be headlining WrestleMania. If the culmination of a year's worth of electrifying worth of work where he's beaten John Cena cleanly, won the WWE Championship and redefined the landscape of SmackDown is a match against a part-timer, then Styles could be forgiven for quietly wondering what has happened to his booking.

What's more frustrating is that WWE could have done a whole host of things as opposed to this. Whether Shinsuke Nakamura is ready for the main roster full-time is irrelevant—he could have stepped up on put on a clinic with Styles on a short-term basis in a match that would have almost certainly stolen the show.

Styles could have added star power to the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal. He could have muscled his way into the WWE Championship scene. He could have taken a pick of the full-time guys competing on SmackDown to try and elevate their position.

But instead, it's McMahon who gets the gig. WWE could have even gone completely out of the box, after all. This is 2017, and Goldberg holds the Universal Championship after little over 100 seconds of in-ring action and done something dramatic. SmackDown vs. Raw, a battle of the brands, with someone like Finn Balor stepping up to the plate for Raw. It would have been magical.

Time is not on his side. Styles is most certainly not approaching his last dance, but the sunset is slowly creeping its way into AJ's career at the age of 40. 

Last year's preliminary bout against Chris Jericho felt like a missed opportunity, and this one also falls into that category. It barely gets the juices flowing—the only real consolation is that Styles is surely going to go over.

Isn't he?