Analysis – Apollo Crews’ Intercontinental Championship Reign, Why It Was A Failure

This week on Friday Night Smackdown, Apollo Crews dropped the WWE Intercontinental Championship to Shinsuke Nakamura. At this stage of the title reign of Apollo crews dropping the WWE Intercontinental Championship is a little bit shocker.

Nothing against Shinsuke Nakamura though, he completely deserved this Championship run that he is going to receive. Nakamura did not get pushed for quite a long time. The last time he won this title was two years ago at the extreme rules pay per view event when he defeated Finn Balor for the title.

Analysis – Apollo Crews’ Intercontinental Championship Reign, Why It Was A Failure

Hopefully, Nakamura will have a good title run and it is looking like WWE is building him as a potential main eventer once again. The first time they tried to building was the main eventer was in Royal Rumble 2018 when he won the event but his push did not work very well. Since then he has never been pushed to the main event. This might be the time.

Speaking of Apollo Crews, when he turned heel and challenged Big E for the WWE Intercontinental Championship at WrestleMania 37, it looks like WWE will push him to a good position now. He was even being accompanied by Commander Azeez who was formerly known as Dabba Kato.

Everybody thought it might be the time of Apollo Crews and he will have a very good time with the WWE intercontinental championship. The beginning was quite well to be honest, but slowly it started to be fading away. The expectation everyone had from this title reign, WWE could not deliver even half of it.

He did have his feud with Big E continued for a month or so. He also defended the title every now and then against wrestlers like Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens. But none of the matches were built strongly. Ultimately the title reign turned out to be a very average one.

He kept the title on his shoulders for over four months but he did not defend the title in any pay per view event. He did not have any steady feud for the title since winning the championship. Even the last match of him as a champion was not sold by WWE at all. For some unknown reason WWE gave up hopes on him.

It is still not understood why WWE did not utilise the title reign of Apollo Crews when there were a number of WWE stars where is sitting idle in SmackDown. The reign was actually terribly booked, it could have been an excellent title reign but ultimately it was a huge failure. We hope WWE would not stop pushing Crews.