10 Best WWE Raw Brand Pay-Per-Views Ever

7. Great Balls Of Fire 2017

Brock Lesnar Samoa Joe
WWE.com

Whilst it will almost certainly go down as the stupidest name for a pay-per-view in WWE history, Great Balls of Fire turned out to be a rather fun show. There was always a sense that WWE was treating it as a throwaway summer event, as it was headlined by a one-and-done Universal Championship shot for Samoa Joe. Expectations were low.

That main event only went six minutes, but the 'Samoan Submission Machine' came out of it looking like a star. Lesnar and Joe had an excellent mean guy match, battering each other with strikes and suplexes in a mile-a-minute brawl that had the crowd enthralled from start to finish. You can complain about the abrupt ending, but maybe that says more about presumptions than presentations.

Braun Strowman and Roman Reigns continued their feud in an Ambulance Match, another wonderful mean guy contest that featured a whole lot of brutality and not a lot of subtlety. Strowman won via Reigns’ own stupidity, but 'The Big Dog' got his revenge on the 'Monster Among Men' with a little bit of attempted murder after the bout.

Cesaro & Sheamus defeated The Hardy Boyz in a fun Iron Man match earlier in the show, whilst Big Cass squashed Enzo Amore like the bug he is. It wasn’t perfect, but this show was far better than most thought it was going to be.

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Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.