Backstage Details On Matt Riddle’s Debut Segment

It was a team effort. There are a lot of stories taking place in WWE at the moment and some of them are involving names who are just making their debuts on the main roster. That can create some interesting moments with big time matches, one of which went down last month on SmackDown. It turns out that there were several different people involved in making it come together so well.

Back on the June 19 SmackDown, Matt Riddle made his main roster debut. Now that he was finally on the main roster, Riddle made an immediate impact by facing and defeating Intercontinental Champion AJ Styles in a non-title match. The match came after a back and forth segment between the two of them, which happened to have a lot more structure than you might have thought.

Fightful Select has several details about the segment, which was filmed in advance along with the rest of the show. The lines that Styles and Renee Young read during the segment were positioned on the table that was holding the Intercontinental Title and the wrestlers were told to change positions during Riddle’s entrance so the camera could make sure to see his bare feet. At one point, Riddle accidentally read one of Styles’ lines and said “my bad bro”, which got a laugh from the NXT wrestlers around the ring. John Laurinaitis was one of the main people in charge of the segment.

It was a heck of a debut. Check out how it went down and the match that followed:

Opinion: This is one of those things that I can’t get my head around at times. Were Styles, Riddle and Young really not trusted enough to stand in the ring and have a five to ten minute discussion? They really needed to have their lines written out for them? Styles has been doing this for over twenty years and seems comfortable on a microphone. That was really necessary with a segment like this one?

What did you think of the segment? Did it need to be scripted? Let us know in the comments below.

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