“We all know we can’t have nice things in MMA. Something’s going to go wrong.”
I said that before Jose Aldo’s title defense against Ricardo Lamas and the enticing prospect of Aldo moving up to lightweight to take on Anthony Pettis should he defend the featherweight title for the 8th consecutive time.
Aldo, thankfully, proved my pessimism wrong. It wasn’t as though I thought he wasn’t capable of dominating Lamas, but being an MMA fan is like being a Canucks fan sometimes–you come to expect the worst and when you don’t expect the worst, the worst seems to happen. There were no freak accidents last night for the featherweight champ though and while he didn’t get the finish, he put on a 5-round display of perfect technique.
If you wanted to show someone the epitome of mixed martial arts, it would be Aldo measuring his opponent, waiting for him to move, and then counter-striking seemingly at twice the speed and with twice the accuracy. Or maybe it would be Aldo, picked up off his feet by Lamas, but somehow managing to fight off the challenger’s takedown by bracing himself against the cage wall like a real life Spiderman.
Lamas came on strong near the end, taking the 5th round, but he never put Aldo in danger, and it was a decisive win for the champion, who, as Dana White happily announced, will indeed move up in weight to fight Anthony Pettis for the 155lb strap for his next fight. I can’t wait.
Still, UFC 169 wasn’t without it’s mishaps.
It’s difficult to come down too hard on Herb Dean. He’s still the best referee in the business, but it’s hard to deny that he made a mistake with his stoppage of the main event between Renan Barao and Urijah Faber. Barao, who was defending his bantamweight title, hit Faber early and often, but the finish came when Faber seemed to be blocking the champion’s attempts at punching him in the head with his hand and shoulder. Urijah was likely on his way to being defeated, but he certainly wasn’t down and out when the fight was called, even flashing a thumbs up to try to demonstrate that he while he was caught in a bad position, he was okay.
Faber, who would have been excused if he’d taken the call less than gracefully, was all class following the defeat. While he maintained that he felt the stoppage was premature, he still tipped his hat to Dean (“Herb is a great referee”), to Barao (“what a great champion”), and, rather than promoting himself, shouted out Alpha Male teammate T.J. Dillashaw as the next contender at 135lbs (“let him clean up my dirty work”).
If you had asked me to pick a fight of the night contender before Saturday, Abel Trujillo’s fight with Jamie Varner wouldn’t have been top of mind, but it was hands down the most entertaining bout of the evening. Varner hurt Trujillo badly in round 2, but “Killa” kept swinging and connected with a monster right hand that turned Varner’s lights out. It was a reminder that, for all we talk about beautiful technique, two guys biting down on their mouth guards and swinging for the fences is still one of the things that makes MMA so great.
Elsewhere on the main card, Frank Mir will likely fall out of the UFC heavyweight top-10 for the first time in over half a decade after Alistair Overeem dominated him for 15-minutes and Ali Bagautinov and John Lineker’s fight didn’t quite live up to it’s billing, as Bagautinov found out early that he had to respect Lineker’s power and cautiously captured a decision win.
