Tim B takes a look at an up-and-down UFC London event with a surreal spectacle of a main event between Anderson Silva and Michael Bisping.
What a strange and beautiful main event. I’ll save my criticism of Anderson Silva for a few minutes while I talk about the person that needs to be focused upon – Michael Bisping. The veteran British fighter fought the best fight of his long career, and showed more heart than I’ve ever seen from him. He didn’t play Anderson’s games, and he didn’t get caught up in the hoopla. Even when controversy struck, he shook it off and continued to fight. My hat’s off to Bisping – I already had a lot of respect for him, and I have even more today. He’s a warrior.
So what the hell happened in the third round? Bisping was really worried about his mouthpiece, and it looked to me like Herb Dean did stop the action to allow him to retrieve it. Then he got destroyed with the flying knee from Anderson, who thought he had won the fight. Bisping somehow recovered and fought on, but that never should have happened. It could have just been hesitance on Dean’s part, and I haven’t watched a replay of it so I can’t be 100% sure of what I saw, but to me, that was Dean’s fault.
Now, onto Silva. I have never been a fan of his antics, and it’s incredibly frustrating to not see him put forth his best effort. If he would have pressed more, he could have taken that fight. But he was too busy backing off and trying to be flashy. There’s no doubt that the flashy worked sometimes – it’s unbelievable that Bisping didn’t go down from that front kick. I just wish we could see aggressive Anderson and not clowny Anderson. It feels like he’s not giving the fans their money’s worth when he does that sort of thing.
- Gegard Mousasi could have done so much more with that fight. It was clear that he had a large striking advantage over Thales Leites, especially in the second half of the fight, but he just wouldn’t pull the trigger. It’s been a running theme of Mousasi’s career – his technique is beautiful, but he really lacks killer instinct at times. He did a good job grappling and he got a nice win, but I wasn’t a huge fan of his work overall.
- Fight Pass cut out at the start of the Tom Breese vs. Keita Nakamura fight, so I missed the entire first round. I thought the second round was great though – slick grappling from both men, who showed off some major craftiness. The third didn’t deliver, but Breese looked good again and took the unanimous decision.
- I didn’t think Brad Pickett beat Francisco Rivera. At all. The fight was thrilling, with both men throwing caution to the wind and brawling, giving the crowd what they wanted to see. But Rivera dropped him in the first, and had him hurt in the second as well. As usual, Pickett showed a ton of heart and wasn’t going to back down, but I’m very surprised that two judges gave him two rounds. Not a robbery, but just not a good decision.
- The undercard was a strange mix of exciting finishes and boring fights. David Teymur started the night with a beautiful uppercut finish of fellow TUF competitor Martin Svensson. Teemu Packalen followed that with a crazy 22-second submission win over Thibault Gouti, starting the whole sequence with a beauty uppercut as well. Things slowed considerably for the next four fights, with Rustam Khabilov arguably fighting like the best of the bunch with a unanimous decision win over Norman Parke. But Scott Askham stepped things back up considerably with an insanely cool finish of Chris Dempsey. Finally, Makwan Amirkhani closed the prelims out with a solid grappling-oriented win over Mike Wilkinson.