Chris Jericho recently made a surprise return to SmackDown Live to record to new episodes of Southpaw Regional Wrestling but was talked into competing by Vince McMahon. Apparently, the hope was that he would just have a match with AJ Styles on the Tuesday but the botched finish to his fight with Kevin Owens at Battleground resulted in it being a Triple Threat match instead.
"The idea was for me to work with AJ on Tuesday, do nothing with Kevin," Jericho said, hinting that the plan was not for Owens to win the title at the PPV. "And then the match happened on the Sunday and they legitimately screwed it up, it happens sometimes. Whatever happened didn't work. That's why they did the triple threat, because they had to get the belt back on AJ because of the screw-up over the weekend."
"It ended up working out great," Jericho added. "It was the classic Vince line of taking a negative and turn it into a positive. And it was a great appearance, the match was great, the promo was great. It was a lot of fun." It's hard to argue with that and it was definitely a good way to get the title back on Styles after the weird way the match at Battleground wrapped up!