Cedric Alexander joined the WWE Raw roster after WrestleMania earlier this year and found himself in the running for the United States championship in September. Alexander twice dropped title matches to AJ Styles, the first on the Clash of Champions kickoff show on September 15th and then again 2 weeks later on an episode of Raw.

Following his two straight defeats to AJ Styles, reports surfaced that Alexander’s push had being derailed backstage. Alexander spoke to Talk Sport recently and refuted these claims.

“Of course [it annoyed me],” Alexander stated. “When you hear things like that, it doesn’t help my brand, you know what I mean? Regardless of how you feel about it, whether you think AJ buried me or not—it was fine. I knew what it was! It was great matches, I got to show a lot of my personality and my in-ring style. A loss isn’t a burial. It’s AJ Styles, how is that a burial?! He’s one of the holy trinity’s of wrestling to me [with Samoa Joe and Christopher Daniels] so to lose to essentially a wrestling deity is fine by me.”

“I read comments like, ‘Cedric is great, but they’re burying him’ but it’s like, you must have check out the match then? It was good, right? You can’t get buried losing to AJ Styles. You just can’t. There’s a reason they’re putting me in a the ring with AJ Styles.”

In the days leading up to Alexander vs Styles at Clash of Champions, it was reported in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that he would be pushed slowly. Then, following Alexander’s loss to Styles in under 5 minutes, another report from the Wrestling Observer stated that Vince McMahon had dropped the idea of pushing him.

“I was told last night that Vince McMahon wanted to bury him,” Meltzer said in relation to Alexander. “I don’t know why, why you would want to do that.”