AJ Styles Title Defense Announced for Clash of Champions

It didn’t take long for us to find out the main event of WWE’s next PPV event.

During SmackDown on Tuesday night, it was announced that WWE champion AJ Styles will be defending his title at Clash of Champions against former champion Jinder Mahal. The Clash will be the final PPV show of 2017, as RAW is off of PPV until the Royal Rumble.

Styles came out for a promo in the ring about halfway through the show and first dedicated his attention to Brock Lesnar and the match that they had at Survivor Series. Styles spoke about how some people said his performance reminded them of Rocky, and he noted that Rocky won the rematch. He issued that as a warning to Lesnar, declaring he’d like to face-off in the future once again.

Styles then turned his attention to Mahal, who AJ planned on calling out for a match on Tuesday night. Jinder appeared on the video screen, and Styles called him down to the road, noting that he didn’t do much at Survivor Series and should be fresh (Mahal didn’t have a match at the PPV).

Mahal noted that he would choose when the rematch would occur, mentioned that Texas (where SmackDown was being broadcast from) wasn’t worthy of the match, and told Styles he’d be using his rematch clause at Clash of Champions.

Mahal also called himself the “beastmaster,” which lead to this great response from Styles.

The match at Clash of Champions will be intriguing for several reasons, most notably due to the fact that it will give us a huge clue as to the direction for WrestleMania season.

Some have speculated that Cena vs. Mahal at WrestleMania is still in the cards, which would mean Mahal recapturing the title would be likely. However, even though Mahal’s recent title run was interesting at first, it noticably ran out of steam toward the end and didn’t really lead to the kind of economic boom in the India market that the company was looking for. They recently had to cancel one of their December India shows due to poor ticket sales.

On the other hands, many fans are still holding out hope that Styles could battle Shinsuke Nakamura for the title at WrestleMania in what would be an epic rematch of their bout from NJPW WrestleKingdom a couple of years ago.

The Styles/Nakamura match is easily the better title program by virtually every measure, but WWE sometimes gets set on a plan and digs in, refusing to change paths (see: Reigns vs. Lesnar still being the plan for WrestleMania on the RAW brand).

We’ll have to stay tuned to see where things are headed, but December will be a huge month for the SmackDown brand.