Saturday Night's Main Event XLIII: Montreal Gets Sami Zayn; AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura Get One More Night

Booking Verdict Grade: A-. The show makes three obvious decisions and gets all three right. Rhea Ripley and IYO SKY had only recently won the Women's Tag Team Championship, so retaining against Liv Morgan and Roxanne Perez preserves a new title run without making the challengers feel incidental. Raquel Rodriguez's interference and Stephanie Vaquer's return expand the women's stories around the match rather than simply repeating another clean tag finish.

AJ Styles beating Shinsuke Nakamura is even more straightforward. Styles is seven days away from risking his career against Gunther. Sending him into that match after losing to Nakamura would create the wrong kind of doubt. Instead, Styles wins after twenty-one minutes, Nakamura gets one of his best WWE singles performances in years, and both men leave with more stature than they entered. The handshake is useful precisely because the match earns it first.

Sami Zayn winning the four-way in Montreal is the booking equivalent of remembering to put candles on a birthday cake. The outcome is obvious, but refusing to do it would only make the promotion look clever in the least useful way. WWE lets Zayn beat Priest rather than Orton or Trick Williams, which protects the two men with the most obvious future upside while still giving Zayn a real pinfall victory. Drew McIntyre attacking afterward keeps the title match heated without stealing the closing celebration.

The Rhodes-Fatu non-match may be the smartest piece of booking on the entire show. Neither man needs a television loss a week before the Rumble, and the feud needs hatred more than it needs a referee explaining a disqualification. The brawl gives both men violence, gives McIntyre another connection to the story and allows the advertised match to remain unresolved. It is a rare case where not having the match is more productive than having it.

Crowd & Presentation Grade: A. Montreal is not background scenery here; Montreal is one of the performers. Sami Zayn receives the reaction the entire main event has been designed around, with the crowd singing his theme, chanting through the match and turning every near fall into a referendum on whether WWE wants to leave the building intact. AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura benefit from a different kind of respect. Their history gives the audience permission to treat a late-added match like an occasion.

The two-hour format is almost perfect for Saturday Night's Main Event. Thomas Hall and John Canton both praised how much the show accomplished with three matches and a long opening brawl, and the Peacock listing confirms a 107-minute episode rather than a modern premium-event marathon. There is no filler match squeezed in because somebody has new merchandise. There is no fourth hour where the building slowly negotiates with gravity.

The women's tag has the show's most visible production/execution blemish. Roxanne Perez appears to have IYO SKY pinned after Pop Rox, but Ripley's save arrives late enough that the referee visibly interrupts the count. Hall called the moment bad, Bleacher Report also highlighted the mistiming, and the mistake briefly breaks the illusion. The match recovers, but a major false finish should not require the referee to suddenly forget what three comes after.

The Rhodes-Fatu brawl is presented with excellent movement. It travels through the crowd and concourse, uses tables and security as environmental pieces and ends with McIntyre standing over both men. That gives the special a visual identity before the first official match even begins.

Michael Cole and Wade Barrett also benefit from having a crowd this responsive. They do not need to manufacture importance because the building keeps supplying it. The result is one of the strongest atmospheres in the revived Saturday Night's Main Event run.

Provisional Historical Significance Grade: B. Saturday Night's Main Event XLIII is not historically important because it changes the company overnight. Its significance comes from several smaller threads converging in one compact show.

The first is AJ Styles versus Shinsuke Nakamura. Styles retires from WWE competition one week later after losing to Gunther at the Royal Rumble, making this the final WWE singles match between Styles and Nakamura. Their rivalry stretches through New Japan and WWE, and the Montreal bout gives it a far more satisfying WWE closing chapter than many viewers expected after their uneven 2018 series.

The second is Sami Zayn. His victory sends him to the Royal Rumble to challenge Drew McIntyre for the Undisputed WWE Championship. The title match itself does not become a career-changing championship victory, but the Montreal win is still a major home-market moment and another example of WWE using Zayn's relationship with Canadian crowds as a central event asset.

The show is also the first Saturday Night's Main Event in Canada since 2007, restoring another geographic piece of the program's history after the concept's modern revival. The women's tag match continues the increasingly serious treatment of the Women's Tag Team Championship, while Trick Williams receives an important main-roster showcase without taking the fall.

The Rhodes-Fatu brawl gains some historical weight through what follows, because Drew McIntyre's involvement keeps the WWE Championship orbit connected to both men. Still, the grade remains provisional. Unlike Royal Rumble, WrestleMania or a major title-change event, this special is primarily connective tissue. It is unusually good connective tissue, but history may remember the Styles-Nakamura farewell chapter more than the complete card.