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On Sunday morning, without spectators, with reduced staff, the world’s leading MMA gala, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, took place in Jacksonville, Florida, along with a series of disinfection and detection protocols. UFC 249 was the first truly large-scale sporting event of real global interest after a general forced break covering essentially all major sports due to the coronavirus epidemic. Consequently, in addition to the economic reopening of the United States, there is also Donald Trump, who is often an opportunist. video message He welcomed the gala and UFC President Dana White, who was a co-star along with several campaign events.
The UFC has gone to great lengths to rescue the gala, which was originally scheduled for April 18 (unsuccessfully), and then redesign it after softening Florida’s epidemic rules. Doubts about the viability of the gala, after all, examined 25,524 new coronavirus infections in the US. USA On Saturday and 1,422 new deaths were recorded, they never dissipated. One of the matches had to be abandoned less than 24 hours before the start of UFC 249 after one of the participants, Ronaldo Jacaré Souza and two of his coaches, also detected the coronavirus.
But the UFC did not comply with one of the preset security measures at the gala, the omission of the traditional post-match interview and the blood and sweat were not wiped from the sand after the matches, nor did I see any disinfection in the transmission. .
4 games, 4 KO in total in two minutes
The gala promised very strong pairings in advance, but of the main matches, only Vicente Luque and Niko Price had their battle with the former cruel left hook and Anthony Pettis’s fun victory against Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone was really good. Among the prime-time games shown, his scoring victory against former NFL star Greg Hardy Yorgan de Castro, starring the UFC, was outrageous. In contrast, the lightweight (65lb) Calvin Kattar, surviving tough attacks, opened the Ram Gap to the forehead of the traditionally aggressive Jeremy Stephens with a handsome counter-elbow.
Cameroonian giant Francis Ngannou, after the failure of his first World Cup attempt, and the most uneventful game in UFC history, came very close and claimed his fourth consecutive TKO victory against heavyweight Rickikho, a player. very technical kickboxing. .
Also, like his previous three games, Ngannou was able to finish his opponent in one minute, so he didn’t spend a total of three minutes on the battlefield in the past four games.
After receiving two internal knee kicks, he warmed up the locomotive and ran down Rozenstruik. Although his first three blows only cut the air, he immediately sat at the bottom of his surinam from his fourth blow, which for a long time he didn’t even know where he was.
The legend was removed for the first time.
Henry Cejudo, an American who also collects the airweight and dewweight championship titles, fought the main event with Dominick Cruz, the greatest champion in the history of the weight class. This match was also interesting because, despite Cruz’s 24-game MMA past, he leaped like a dark horse to replace José Aldo, who came from a featherweight but lost due to visa problems. Cruz has spent approximately seven of the past nine years recovering from injury, so he doubted how much his exceptional footwork and dynamic counterattacks could bring. Many have also complained about how Cruz may have outpaced the growing dew claimants to the throne in recent years, Petr Jan, Aljamain Sterling or Cory Sandhagen.
On the contrary, nobody had doubts about the power of the current world champion. Following the title of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Wrestling Championship, Henry Cejudo won the legendary Demetrious Johnson 57-pound airweight championship belt in 2018, with the help of a strong scoring judge. Dillashawt, and then with exceptional willpower and a testimony to superhuman toughness, crushed Marlon Moraes last summer.
At the start of the match, Cejudo tried to slow down Cruz’s dance with strong knee kicks, which also abandoned landing attempts after some hesitant attempts. For the second run, then, despite continued kicks, Cruz found the hitting distance, but when, at the end of the run, after a hit, he wanted to grab Cejudo’s hip,
The champion countered the attempt with a knee kick thrown at a fantastic pace.
And after Cruz hit the ground, Cejudo rolled onto his back and started lining it up like a sewing machine. Judge Keith Peterson also weighed in on the order and manner, after which Cruz fiercely protested, saying that he was completely in the picture and that he would have tickled the remaining two seconds until the end of the round. Cruz also had some truth in this, but also the fact that he did not defend himself at all against the series’ 11 punches.
The former champion suffered the first KO loss of his career, but to the great surprise, it was not Cruz but Henry Cejudo who announced that
At 33, he retires with two world championship belts and a 15-2 record.
The Great Retreats don’t have to be taken for granted in the martial arts, it could easily be that Cejudo also threw it as a kind of additional fuss to stop competing, and despite his brilliant performance, he didn’t empty any of his weight classes, for which has a lot to challenge.
Habib’s new challenger left his business at a whimsical pace
The main match was fought by lightweight (70lb) Tony Ferguson (typically nicknamed “El Cucuy” or “El Horror”), who was fifth behind the summit against Habib Nurmagodmedov, who was stuck in Russia, but in return received a very dangerous opponent in the person of Justin Gaeth. : Gaethje’s fortresses gave life to Ferguson. While Ferguson is legendarily slow to heat up in the match and without overdoing it needs a full heartbeat to start feeling his opponent, Gaethje is a true predator who, once he smells of blood, quickly kills his opponents with his terrifyingly strong punches . Ferguson’s defense is also pretty flawed, knocking him down in almost every game, but once Gaethje knocks someone down, he no longer gets up from there.
So if we look at Ferguson’s weaknesses, Gaethje seems like a real nightmare. But in the meantime, aspiring champion legend Ferguson is almost a tough face in an action movie – even the harshest beating isn’t felt in his performance – in fact, the more punches he takes, the more he spins. Furthermore, in addition to being very good in all areas of the fight, Ferguson stockpiled a number of dangerous weapons against Gaeth: strong, first-hand shots fired from both positions, straight kicks under the sternum, and tibia kicks that paralyze Gaeth’s legs. their opponents. own lukewarm).
The wrestlers were also aware of the mutual threat as they both started unusually cautiously, Gaethje found good hooks and left kicks, Ferguson really didn’t find his kicks, and he was only able to shoot the hitting distance for the second round, with a nice shot on the last second of the round. he shook his opponent. In the third round, Ferguson seemed to need a stream of blood dripping from both sides of his head to get to the match, and he seemed to be able to turn the pace to his signature level. Gaethje was visibly tired and switched to a more frugal mode, but with his punches he completely destroyed the fight of Ferguson (who defended defensively, swallowing 143 of the hit to 197), with his knee-to-knee kicks, stopping his attacks with a hook right on the fourth turn. he shook him.
In the fifth round, his coaches encouraged Ferguson to make a final attack, but he ran into rock-hard punches with a completely reorganized facial fighting line, and when the referee saw that he was barely slowing down, he stopped the game less than two minutes before the end.
Ferguson lost the game again after 2012, and like Dominick Cruz, he ran into the first KO of his life. The loss also means that Ferguson, who is already 36 years old and has been through great battles, will probably never be able to compare his strength to Habib again, but the champion of Dagestan can compete against Justin Gaeth in the fall.
(Cover image: Game between Justin Gaethje and Tony Ferguson at UFC 249. Gala: Photo by Douglas P. DeFelice / Getty Images Hungary)
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