5 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE Battleground 2017

2. KO, AJ Have Match Of The Night

Aj Styles Kevin Owens Wwe Battleground
WWE.com

Given what the main event was going to be, it’s no shock that the secondary championship title match produced the best match of the night.

AJ Styles and Kevin Owens had a good back-and-forth matchup, trading near-falls and submission holds, escaping each other’s finishing moves and coming close to leaving Philadelphia with the United States Championship. Owens, having lost his title at a Madison Square Garden house show earlier this month was looking for revenge, and he got it in a manner or speaking.

KO rolled over a crossface from AJ for a pin from a groggy referee, winning his third U.S. title. It certainly felt like it was out of nowhere, and just as the match was seriously ramping up. While that normally would mean a negative, it also felt like this was unresolved like they needed to have one… more… match… at SummerSlam.

Now that is certainly good enough reason for that finish.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.