It looks like Mauricio Rua will get another fight relatively quickly after suffering a recent injury.
Despite suffering a recent injury that upended a UFC on Fox 19 bout with Rashad Evans, Mauricio Rua will be stepping back into the octagon pretty soon. And it will be in his home country of Brazil, in front of an expected 40,000 fans.
The UFC is targeting a bout between Shogun and Corey Anderson for the UFC 198 card, which goes down May 14th in Curitiba. The info comes from MMA Fighting.
It’s a bit of an odd situation – Shogun’s manager Rafael Cordeiro claims that Rua was willing to fight Evans on the Fox card, but Lorenzo Fertitta himself saw his knee exams and concluded that the fight would be cancelled. That fight would have taken place on April 16th, but he is still getting booked a month later.
It seems like they just wanted Shogun to fight on a high-profile Brazil card, which would make sense. In fact, UFC Brazil general manager Giovanni Decker said today on Brazilian TV that a bout between Evan Dunham and Leonardo Santos was removed from the card to make room for this bout. Those two men will likely compete at UFC 199 instead.
Rua hasn’t competed since August where he defeated Antonio Rogerio Nogueira. Anderson, a TUF winner, has won three in a row and is 5-1 in the UFC overall. His most recent bout was a decision win over Tom Lawlor just 10 days ago at UFC 196.