10 Great WWE SummerSlam Matches You've Forgotten About
The best of the rest...
Next month's SummerSlam will be the 30th show in the event's history, and if we suppose that each show has, conservatively, seven matches a piece, that's... a lot of matches.
Too many matches for us to remember, in fact. And if you ask fans to name their all-time favourite SummerSlam encounters you're likely to see some combination of the same 10 or 15 answers.
The British Bulldog's Wembley clash with Bret Hart in 1992, Shawn Michaels and Vader in 1996, HBK's unsanctioned fight with Triple H in 2002, Lesnar's changing-of-the-guard moment with The Rock the same year.
All of them great matches - but what about the ones that we have forgotten about? Crowd-rousing openers and mid-show tag team bouts aren't quite as important as the main event - the clue is in the name: main event - but wrestlers who work the under-card are every bit as deserving of recognition.
And SummerSlam - second only to WrestleMania in terms of great matches - has a limitless reserve of hidden gems worthy of repeat viewing.
10. Eddie Guerrero Vs Rhyno Vs Tajiri Vs Chris Benoit (2003)
SmackDown's main event scene in 2003 was monopolised almost all year by the epic WWE Championship feud between Kurt Angle and Brock Lesnar - which was great, except that it left a slew of upper-mid-carders without a huge amount to do.
The solution they came up with was to bring back the United States Championship to function as a second-tier title, and before it became a tragic after-thought, it did produce some pretty stellar wrestling in its early goings.
At SummerSlam, inaugural champion Eddie Guerrero defended the belt in a pulsating four-way bout with Rhyno, Tajiri and Chris Benoit. A match unfortunately cut about five or six minutes short by the two monster main events to come later in the night, granted, but a fine example of how stacked the WWE roster was right around this time.