UFC 292 is wrapped up.
Sean O’Malley is the new bantamweight champion. Aljamain Sterling has to do a bit of soul searching whether he stays in the division or moves up another weight class.
And I still think that referee Marc Goddard stepped in prematurely to end the fight. Yes, Aljo was in trouble, but he wasn’t out, and was certainly still moving. This fight could have gone on for another 10 seconds or so to see if Sterling had a chance to recover or not.
Now we will never know.
I think that leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
UFC 292—may not be the best of the big numbered events—but it is certainly the cause of much analysis and discussion. Who would have thought debate about another premature stoppage would creep into the discussion?
The title fights are always a hot topic but prior to the co-main events, I wanted to talk about how Ian Garry totally outclassed Neil Magny.
Well so did Zhang Weili against Amanda Lemos.
Both Neil and Amanda gutted it out and made it to the final round of their respective fights. While some will interpret that as a testament to their courage and toughness—and maybe they are—but the way I look at it, they endured 15 and 25 minutes of punishment and humiliation.
How many times did Garry knock Magny down with a leg kick? At least three times. And each time Garry asked Magny to get up as if to say, “No worries dude, I’ll just plant you on your butt again.”
Magny was wincing in pain and hobbling from the second and third rounds. He is going to need more than a month before he walks right again.
Zhang Weili, the reigning UFC women’s champion, went all super typhoon on Lemos who looked like she was drowning in a sea of strikes and leg kicks as well as takedowns and submission attempts. I don’t think Lemos needed advice from her corner. What she needed was an oxygen tank! Or shelter from the storm.
Since Zhang bounced back from back-to-back losses to Rose Namajunas (the second which I think was controversial), Weili has been devastating! I’d love to see her lock horns with Namajunas for their own trilogy.
I have had the good fortune of interviewing Weili twice now—one face to face during UFC 275 in Singapore and the second prior to UFC 292 on Zoom—and she did bare how she was driven to improve her skills and not leave it to the judges’ scorecards for close ones.
I think it is great that Weili has found huge success in her second go-around as UFC strawweight champion. I know she has been inspirational not just to her countrymen in China but to others as well who see her as a symbol of not giving up and constantly improving herself.
Now the onus is on Neil Magny and Amanda Lemos to bounce back big time from these losses that exposed them.
Chris Weidman, a former UFC champion, made his return also to action in the final match of the preliminary cards after more than two years away due to a broken leg That he survived all three rounds against Brad Tavares should give him some confidence but clearly he cannot fight this way—tentative and unable to put together combinations. He did rock Tavares on several occasions but because Tavares teed off on his legs he couldn’t find the power to land that haymaker.
So following these painful defeats the questions are—what did you learn from it and what did you learn from this?
Otherwise the Beatdown in Beantown will always be a painful memory.
Beatdown in Beantown
Source: News Paper Radio
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