One of the biggest surprises of all time was the gala of the world’s leading MMA organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, on Sunday morning Hungarian time. In the main match of UFC 293 held in Sydney, Australia, the American Sean Strickland, who has an average match record and modest qualities, defied the expectations of analysts and bookmakers, and beat the middleweight (84 kg) virtuoso champion, the Nigerian-New Zealander Israel Adesanya. Moreover, Strickland triumphed in the most improbable way: his victory was not due to an unexpected hit, he wrestled five times for five minutes calmly and confidently, and in addition, he surpassed the former kick-boxing world champion in a pure stand-up fight.
However, Strickland only got a chance as a substitute. The 32-year-old Californian, who left his brutal childhood, his abusive father and his self-abusing self behind with the help of martial arts therapy, has just begun to recover after two defeats. However, with Israel Adesanya’s defeat of his arch-rival Alex Pereira in April (and the Brazilian’s change of weight class), he was virtually left without a serious opponent. And after his most recent challenger, South Africa’s Dricus du Plessis, was injured, the champion challenged Strickland, ranked only a modest fifth, saying (that is, posting) that he had already beaten everyone else in the middleweight division — most of them twice.
Bookmakers and analysts alike did not give Strickland, who did not have a large offensive repertoire apart from his first hand punches, much of a chance against Adesanya, who wore down his opponents with a real system of goading and scaring, tempo changes and zoning. The preliminary oddsmakers were at most worried that the New Zealander would tend to sit on his superiority against more passive opponents unable to press him, and to absolve the match with a safety game. On the other hand, as Adesanya himself said, a routine wrestler gets the most chills from such, at first glance, easy-to-beat opponents, because in these matches he has to enter the Octagon not only with the weight of the compulsion to win.
That’s why the champion understandably started cautiously, trying to move and force his opponent to react, in order to gather information that he can later use in his characteristic precise counters. Strickland awkwardly but persistently drove the champion to the wall of the octagon, while carefully trying to block Adesanya’s leg kicks. The New Zealander confidently ducked away from the American’s first hand punches, but at the end of the first round he looked badly into a left-right combination. Strickland’s right landed squarely on Adesanya’s chin, the champion was dizzy, and his challenger, smelling the smell of blood, threw himself at him. However, the rock-hard and routine Adesanya stopped the attack and came out for the second round as if nothing had happened.
Let’s say “nothing would have happened” also meant that Adesanya couldn’t switch to a higher gear, couldn’t start the real destruction. Strickland was very well prepared for Adesanya’s leg-shredding kicks, – let’s say the American’s narrower fighting stance favored leg-picking blocks – and he kept his head clear of the New Zealander’s counter-kicks. In the meantime, he was able to tease Adesanya with his first-hand straight punches and kicks under the sternum, and in addition, he had combinations in every round with which he was able to achieve more serious hits, which, if they did not shake the champion, definitely caught the champion.
Adesanya also scored many times, but these hits were not shocking, and moreover, she could not build an offensive with which she could have taken the initiative after one good move. Moreover, in the end, it was Adesanya who visibly started to run out of steam, so the hair also belonged to Strickland, who was riding himself in ecstasy.
And the most improbable scenario came true: Israel Adesanya actually suffered a defeat at home, both from a fan and technical point of view, and lost his middleweight world championship belt by unanimous decision. This defeat seemed more significant than the KO he received from Pereira in November last year, because while Adesanya controlled and destroyed most of the match against the Brazilian, he played a largely subordinate role against Strickland – by the way, Strickland has been training a lot in recent times for the American, who had also beaten the American before with a KO. With Pereira.
However, Adesanya’s relative energy does not detract from the merits of Strickland and his coaching staff, in fact. The poor performance means his American team mapped Adesanya’s wrestling perfectly, largely neutralizing the champion’s most dangerous weapons and exploiting the weakness of New Zealand’s defense to over-rely on footwork and deflections, neglecting parries and coverage .
Adesanya also admitted that Strickland was the better Photo: Chris Unger / 2023 Zuffa LLC
Strickland was rightfully jumping and dancing after the results were announced. In the interview after the match, all he could say through tears was that he was unable to say anything for the first time in his life, but in the end he got out so much that
is this a fucking dream i’m gonna wake up from? Somebody hit me! I never thought I would make it this far, even though I sacrificed a lot of my brain cells to the gods of MMA every day.
The surprise victory also thoroughly shook the middleweight division of the UFC. It is doubtful whether Adesanya will be able/willing to fight for the right to an immediate rematch after the double match against Pereira, or whether he will let Strickland try to defend the title against Dricus du Plessis first.
Powerful KO and awkward pranks
Apart from the main event, UFC 293 was not really full of significant matches, but the smaller field compared to the big galas did not mean that there were not spectacular and/or good matches.
New Zealand’s Justin Tafa laid out American Austen Lane with a raw and brutal left hook typical of a heavyweight after some hard punch exchanges. The two had already met once in June, but then Lane caught Tafa’s eye badly (the sight is not only NSFW, but I don’t recommend it for Sunday breakfast either).
Tai Tuivasa, one of the UFC’s most colorful individuals, continued his decline in the co-main event, also held in the heavyweight division; the stocky New Zealander, who blocks body blows with a serious swimming rubber, was this time taken apart by Alexandr Volkov, who is slow, but even compared to the heavyweight, with his collected hand-foot combinations. After Tuivasa began kicking the Russian’s legs apart in the second round, Volkov took his opponent to the ground and ended the match with a rare Ezekiel choke.
A few weight groups lower, the veteran Angolan flyweight (57 kilos) Manel Kape was preparing for his match against Kai Kara-France of New Zealand until the end of August, but Kara-France suffered a concussion during one of his training sessions. Instead of selecting a new opponent from the roster, the UFC resorted to a cheaper solution and signed a young, relatively inexperienced Brazilian wrestler. However, Felipe dos Santos exceeded all expectations in his UFC debut and forced his opponent into a huge fight. Kape was able to win by points only at the cost of a terrible technical, hard and close fight.
Felipe dos Santos and Manel Kape strike together Photo: Mark Evans / 2023 Getty Images
What’s more, the Angolan’s performance, which cannot be described as overwhelming, was topped off with a post-match interview in which he blasted his original opponent, Kai Kara France, and his club, Auckland’s City Kickboxing Club, which has become one of the leading MMA stables of our time (Adesanya trains here and featherweight world champion Alexander Volkanovski) also attacked him. This was an embarrassing scene for the entire UFC, all the more so because an hour and a half earlier, one of the characters in the lead-up matches, the American Charles Radtke, announced to the audience booing him in a similar way.
2023-09-10 07:37:38
#dreaming
