5 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE Battleground 2017

by Scott Carlson

1. New Day, New Champs

new day tag champs
WWE.com

The Usos have managed to reinvent themselves in recent months as heel tag champs, and there’s still plenty of gas left in their tank.

But when you pit them against another top-notch tag team, there’s no shame in losing. And that’s exactly what happened with New Day matching the Usos in an electric opening match. The two teams started out strong and then sped up as the match wore on, hitting a series of near-falls that had the Philly crowd buying into several of them. In particular, a superkick-splash combo on Kofi Kingston had the entire audience thinking that was the end.

New Day persevered and hit a Trouble in Paradise and a diving elbow drop for the win, becoming the first tag team to hold both the Raw and SmackDown tag titles. It started the night off with a great little moment and gave fans a great match to boot.

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Contributor

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.