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Four Hidden Storylines For ‘UFC Fight Night 30: Machida vs. Munoz’

UFC Fight Night 30: Machida vs. Munoz is really flying under the radar as an overall card (thanks in no small part to the truly epic evening that was UFC 166), but if you take a closer look at it, there are actually quite a few intriguing matchups with important questions to answer.

I’ve combed the card up and down and I’ve come up with four hidden storylines that viewers should be aware of going into UFC Fight Night 30. Let me know what you think in the comments section, and be sure to come back to CagePotato on Saturday for our liveblog of the broadcast.

1) Can Lyoto Machida Make a Run at the Middleweight Title?

The most important question that UFC Fight Night 30 will answer, in my opinion, is whether or not Lyoto Machida is going to make a run for the UFC middleweight title. The former light heavyweight champion dropped down to 185 pounds after a controversial decision loss to Phil Davis at UFC 163 and now faces Mark Munoz in Saturday’s main event.

With a win over Munoz, one of the top 10 fighters in the division, Machida will instantly prove that he has what it takes to make a run for the belt at 185 pounds and become just the third fighter in UFC history to win titles in two separate weight classes (the other two fighters who have accomplished this feat being Randy Couture and BJ Penn).

By Adam Martin

1) Can Lyoto Machida Make a Run at the Middleweight Title?

Simply put, Munoz is an incredibly talented mixed martial artist who looked amazing against Tim Boetsch in his last fight, but he’s shown that he can be KO’d and if there’s anything Machida has it’s power. Power and accuracy. Power and accuracy and halitosis. Aside from having all that, Machida also uses his wrestling in reverse better than almost anyone on the planet. He was able to consistently stuff the takedowns of Rashad Evans and Phil Davis at 205 pounds, which leads me to believe that he should have no trouble stuffing Munoz’s, as well. Add in the fact that the fight is five rounds and its makes me lean towards a Machida finish even more, especially considering the result of his last fight.

This weekend, look for Machida to knock Munoz out and emerge as a legit threat to the middleweight championship. And if Chris Weidman beats Anderson Silva in their rematch at UFC 168, you better believe that Machida will be the next guy in line against “The All American” in a fight that could end up being one of the most anticipated of 2014.

2) Will Jimi Manuwa emerge as a dark horse contender at 205 pounds?

There aren’t many undefeated fighters in the UFC light heavyweight division, but one of them is Britain’s Jimi Manuwa, who puts his 13-0 record on the line against Canadian Ryan Jimmo in a main-card matchup at UFC Fight Night 30.

After emerging as a knockout artist on the British regional circuit, Manuwa has come into the UFC and absolutely brutalized Kyle Kingsbury and Cyrille Diabate to the point where both men could no longer fight in his first two fights. In fact, Manuwa iss the only fighter in UFC history to have two fights stopped in between rounds, which shows you just how much power this man is packing in his limbs.

Still, while Manuwa has owned everyone in his path so far, Jimmo does represent a significant step up in competition. It’ll be Manuwa’s toughest test to date, in my opinion, if only because of Jimmo’s ability to get fights to the ground and grind them out. And if Kingsbury was able to get Manuwa down, I think Jimmo can as well, although I’m sure Manuwa’s wrestling has improved a lot in the last year.

At the same time, if Manuwa can stop the takedowns and keep this fight on the feet and land shots on Jimmo, then he should be able to score his 14^th career stoppage in his 14^th career fight. If he can knock Jimmo out cold, I fully expect the UFC to start pushing him into top 10 territory — his fighting style is too marketable not to.

I believe that Manuwa will beat Jimmo this weekend and emerge as a dark horse contender at 205 pounds. I just wish he wasn’t 33 years old, but hey, this is MMA: Fighters in their 30′s can be called prospects. It happens all the time.

3) Alessio Sakara‘s Last Stand

This may come as a surprise to many of you, but middleweight Alessio Sakara is still on the UFC roster, and this Saturday night at UFC Fight Night 30 the Italian striker returns to the cage to face off against Sweden’s Nicholas Musoke in a main card bout that absolutely no one is talking about.

And it’s for good reason that no one is talking about it, as Sakara has lost his last three fights in the UFC and looks to be on the final legs of his career, while Musoke is a total unknown who took this fight on short notice. Yet for some reason the UFC put it on the main card while a good matchup like Andrew Craig vs. Luke Barnatt gets relegated to the prelims. (Who puts together these bout orders, anyways? I just don’t understand it.)

Sakara has been employed by the UFC since 2005, but he’s put up a mediocre 6-7, 1 NC record during that time and only one of those victories is over a current UFC fighter. That would be Thales Leites, who Sakara beat due to a bad judges’ decision at UFC 101. We just passed UFC 166. You get the point.

I think the only reason that Sakara is still in the UFC is because he has cool-looking tattoos and because he is the only Italian fighter on the entire roster. Because if you look at his last batch of fights, he just isn’t UFC caliber, and when the promotion goes and fires a guy like Yushin Okami and keeps Sakara on the roster, it really makes me scratch my head.

To be fair to Sakara, he is generally involved in exciting fights, but at some point winning has to become the priority, and if Sakara loses his fourth straight against Musoke this weekend, the UFC is going to hard a very hard time justifying his roster spot. And that’s why I believe it’s Sakara’s last stand at UFC Fight Night 30.

4) Why Did Jimy Hettes Fall so Far?

UFC 141 was nearly two years ago, but I still remember the night very clearly.

That was the Brock Lesnar vs. Alistair Overeem card, and while that match and the Nate Diaz vs. Donald Cerrone fight overshadowed almost everything else on that card, one other fight remains very vivid in my mind to this very day.

That was the performance of Jimy Hettes, who schooled Nam Phan on the ground for 15 minutes in the opening PPV fight of the night. It was the first time I had seen Hettes fight, and I remember being absolutely blown away by the performance of “The Kid” that night, as he displayed an absolutely brilliant BJJ game that left UFC commentator Joe Rogan at a loss for words.

After that incredible performance on one of the biggest cards of 2011, I was really excited for Hettes’ return to the Octagon, and at UFC 152 he came back to take on Marcus Brimage in an undercard fight that everyone expected him to dominate. Unfortunately for Hettes, he couldn’t take Brimage down and got exposed on the feet en route to a unanimous decision loss – the first defeat of his career.

It’s over a year later now, and Hettes finally returns to the cage and this weekend he takes on UFC newcomer Robert Whiteford on the Facebook prelims of UFC Fight Night 30, a huge fall from being in the opening fight of a Brock Lesnar card. It makes one wonder: Why did “The Kid” fall so far? It’s a fair question, but in my opinion, I think it was a combination of injuries, the short-term memory of MMA fans, and just how disappointed everyone was in his performance against Brimage.

This weekend, however, Hettes has a chance to bounce back and prove to everyone that he’s still a capable featherweight. If he can take out Whiteford in impressive fashion like I think he can, I expect a lot of people to get back aboard the Hettes bandwagon.

UFC Fight Night 30: 5 Questions We Have About Lyoto Machida

Headlining UFC Fight Night 30 this Saturday is a middleweight scrap between former light heavyweight king Lyoto Machida and perennial top contender Mark Munoz.
The matchup will feature one of the best counter-striking practitioners the promotion has ev…

Headlining UFC Fight Night 30 this Saturday is a middleweight scrap between former light heavyweight king Lyoto Machida and perennial top contender Mark Munoz.

The matchup will feature one of the best counter-striking practitioners the promotion has ever seen dropping down to make his divisional debut opposite an unparalleled wrestler.

Now while it seems as if a potent threat like “The Dragon” would have an immediate edge over a guy like Munoz, nothing is for certain.

The Brazilian had to cut weight, hasn’t looked like his dominate self in almost a year and is always susceptible to defeat if he’s brought to the ground in succession.

So to prolong a fresh future in a rapidly growing weight class, Machida needs to answer these five questions this weekend in England.

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Lyoto Machida: Fight with Friend Mark Munoz Will Be All Business at FN 30

Lyoto Machida is set to begin a new chapter in his career this Saturday at Fight Night 30 in Manchester, England.
The former light heavyweight champion has abandoned the light heavyweight division for the time being, a weight class where he’s held the …

Lyoto Machida is set to begin a new chapter in his career this Saturday at Fight Night 30 in Manchester, England.

The former light heavyweight champion has abandoned the light heavyweight division for the time being, a weight class where he’s held the title and been a perennial contender since 2008, to test the waters in the 185-pound fold. While “The Dragon” hasn’t committed to a full-time run at middleweight just yet, the first step he will take into those waters will come at the deep end of the pool as he is set to face a tough test in resurgent contender Mark Munoz.

Where he was originally slated to face Tim Kennedy for his middleweight debut at Fight for the Troops 3 on Nov. 6, an eye injury suffered by Michael Bisping left the UFC’s return to the U.K. with an open slot in the main event. Despite the “Filipino Wrecking Machine” being a good friend and former training partner, Machida didn’t hesitate when the UFC came to call, and a new headlining tilt for the card was made.

While the 36-year-old former strap holder admits it will be strange to face Munoz inside the Octagon, he is confident it will be all business when the cage door closes.

“It’s very weird for me to fight a guy who is my friend but it is part of the job,” Machida told Bleacher Report. “As a professional, I’m not thinking about that. I just focus on the fight. At the gym, you can fight each other in hard training, but now you can do real sparring. I’ll do my best to make it a great fight.

“People can expect my best performance. I’m debuting at 185 and this is a new chapter in my career. We will see on Saturday but I want people to expect the best from me.”

As Machida prepares to make his official middleweight debut on Saturday, it is a situation that will come with a unique amount of pressure. He is coming off a loss—albeit a questionable one— to Phil Davis at UFC 163 in August in a bout that was “make or break” where his immediate status as a title contender in the light heavyweight division was concerned.

Prior to his loss to the former NCAA Division I national champion wrestler, the Team Black House fighter had collected back-to-back victories for the first time since 2009. Yet, with the 205-pound division becoming increasingly competitive over the past year, his setback against Davis put him on the outside looking in at the upper tier of the light heavyweight collective.

With that situation in mind, Machida was quick to find a remedy, and decided to make the drop down to the middleweight division. While he hasn’t shut the door on a possible return to light heavyweight, he refuses to focus on the negative aspects of the losses he’s suffered. Instead, Machida invests his time and energy into getting back into the win column.

“I just try to improve my skills for the next fight,” Machida said. “I try to improve my power and my will power. It doesn’t matter if I lost. I try to do those things because they are very important for an MMA fight. Everyday you have to wake up, go to the gym and train very hard. When they offered me the middleweight fight it is a new moment for my career. I hope to do great and do my best. That’s why I’m here.

“Depending on the fights I get I can go back and forth,” he added. “I can fight at 205 as well, but it depends on the UFC and what they ask of me. I’ll be ready for anything.”

Despite suffering four losses in his last seven fights, Machida remains one of MMA’s most difficult puzzles to solve. His mastery of timing and spacial difference allows him to close ground on the opposition in rapid fashion and land his strikes with power and precision, all the while staying at a safe distance out of harm’s way.

That said, there has been somewhat of a blueprint laid on how to fight the former champion. In addition to Davis’ approach to their bout in Brazil, former Pride and Strikeforce champion Dan Henderson used a similar attack when he faced Machida at UFC 157 back in February. Both fought with patience and were seemingly more than happy to take the fight to the judge’s scorecards.

It is a situation he’s certainly aware of and believes he’s made the proper adjustments to his attack heading into Saturday’s bout with Munoz.

“I think so,” Machida responded when asked about a blueprint to face him. “People don’t want to come in anymore. They want to stay there and wait for an opportunity. They wait for me to make a mistake and they try to catch it. This time I am going to try to be different. I will try to be more aggressive with my punches and kicks. I will try takedowns as well and make this an MMA fight. The people I fight are aware about me for sure, but that is not a problem for me.”

Duane Finley is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report. All quotes are obtained firsthand unless noted otherwise.

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Lyoto Machida at Middleweight: End of the Line for Karate or Another Title Run?

For most of its short history, success in mixed martial arts has been predicated on a fighter’s ability to harness and employ pure, unadulterated force. Though it started as an homage to the gentle art, once the meatheads of the world figured out how to counter and even execute the techniques that once made Gracie jiu-jitsu so effective, subtlety was all but dead in the Octagon.

The emerging sport was dominated by a combination of wrestling and Muay Thai techniques, moves and counters that relied on relentless aggression. This was hard-nosed, straight ahead combat. There was no room for a backward step or deviation of any kind.

Thai boxing and wrestling, in short, were what worked. Nothing else was even considered. This sport had its handful of techniques. Everything else was rejected, or worse, mocked incessantly.

Enter the dragon.

Using the Shotokan Karate his father taught him from an early age in his native Brazil, Lyoto Machida‘s goal was not to be hit, moving around the cage like a cat, waiting for the right time to strike. It was the polar opposite of the Muay Thai approach, a radical departure from MMA‘s ethos of ultra-violence.

Thai boxing was all about toughness. The training was brutal, and the fights even more so. It was the only striking style vetted and tested by a decade-plus of MMA competition. Machida‘s style was an aberration.

Despite being a simple and intuitive strategy, one employed by boxers for years, it wasn’t supposed to work in MMA. Traditional martial arts masters had fallen short against the Gracie family in the early 1990s. That was thought, at the time, to have eliminated those arts from a serious fighter’s lexicon. As I wrote in The MMA Encyclopedia, karate and other arts had met the challenge of the UFC Octagon—and they’d come up short:

The karate club might still be a good place to drop the kids off after school, let them burn off some energy and improve their fitness in an environment that emphasized focus, discipline, and self-control. For most practitioners, those have always been the real benefits of the martial arts anyway, and a good karate dojo still holds to those values. But traditional karate was thought to be incapable of turning out fighters who could compete in the full-contact free-for-all of modern mixed martial arts.

Machida made a liar out of all of us, a fool of anyone who openly mocked fighting arts that had survived for centuries. While he certainly wasn’t the first prominent mixed martial artist to hold rank in a traditional karate discipline, he was the first to look like a karate fighter in the cage.

He didn’t just mix an occasional technique into his Muay Thai attack like some traditional stylists. Machida moved like a karateka. He leaped in and out of range head back in an uncommonly high posture, utterly unpredictable and lethal. Machida did things we had never seen before, countering strikes better than anyone in MMA history not named Chuck Liddell and disguising his amazing foot sweeps behind straight punches.

While it may seem like hyperbole now, Joe Rogan’s proclamation that we were in the “Machida era” felt true during his short prime as a light heavyweight. From the moment he knocked Thiago Silva cold at UFC 94, something seemed special about Machida.

And though he’s declined with time, there can be little doubt that his success was something more than just a fighter making good on his potential. Machida changed the way we thought about what a mixed martial arts fight could be. More than just brutality, there could be beauty too.

And there can be again.

At UFC Fight Night 30 in England Saturday, the 35-year-old Machida makes his debut in the middleweight class. Despite reaching the pinnacle of the sport at 205 pounds, no one could deny that he’s spent most of his career undersized and outgunned. Finally up against like-sized opponents for the first time in his career, the potential for a return to form is very real.

Though he’s gone just 4-4 since winning the light heavyweight title from Rashad Evans in 2009, Machida still has all the tools to succeed at the highest levels. When he’s lost, it’s been mostly in close fights. Twice decisions many thought he deserved went to a game opponent. Besides his bout with champion Jon Jones, he’s never looked outclassed or out of his league.

Entering the middleweight division, after years in the light heavyweight war zone, could be a sweet relief for Machida. The fighters, for the most part, aren’t at the same level as those at 205, long considered the UFC’s marque division. Looking at a list of the top 10 fighters at UFC.com, there isn’t a single name I can’t imagine Machida standing over, hands raised in triumph. That includes top-five wrestler Mark Munoz, a longtime training partner and current opponent.

If he can make a final run to greatness, it will be a wonderful thing for MMA as a sport. He’s brought beauty to a brutal world, one typified by gaudy clothing and often bloodthirsty fans. His brand of stylized violence proves not all fighters are mere brutes. Machida is a true artist, an athletic intellectual in a sport that needs one hundred more of him.

Who else is ready for the Machida era—take two?

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Lyoto Machida Hints at Impending Anderson Silva Retirement

With his impending fight with former training partner Mark Munoz just around the corner, Lyoto Machida is being faced to answer an old question all over again: “Would you fight Anderson Silva?”
He has been asked that question before when Si…

With his impending fight with former training partner Mark Munoz just around the corner, Lyoto Machida is being faced to answer an old question all over again: “Would you fight Anderson Silva?”

He has been asked that question before when Silva was making occasional appearances at light heavyweight. Of course, both men have always stated they would not fight each other.

But now, Machida is being asked the question once again (h/t Steven Marrocco and Matt Erickson of MMAJunkie.com).

“We are friends, but it’s too early to think about that,” Machida said. “I don’t know about the future. That’s what I say to everybody. I’m just arriving. It’s hard to say about a title shot. Everybody is asking about it, but I prefer not to talk about it.”

Right now, Silva is trying to retake his throne from current champion, Chris Weidman.

Yet even if he manages to do so, the role of champion is nothing new to Silva, who has set more championship records than anyone.

But the facts are clear: Machida is now at middleweight, and thus come the question.

“I don’t know how long he’s [Silva] going to fight,” Machida said. “That’s why I don’t think about it.”

And his reasons for going down to middleweight in the first place?

“I just dropped down because I was going to fight against Jon Jones, and that fight couldn’t happen. The UFC gave me an opportunity to fight at 185. I want to stay active.”

Given their longstanding friendship, it is no stretch of the imagination to think that Machida not only knows what Silva’s plans for the future are, but also knows he can make the move freely, without worry of damaging that friendship.

After all, according the Bleacher Report’s Jeremy Botter, Silva said earlier this month that he would retire before fighting Machida, and that says a great deal.

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UFC Fight Night 30: How Can Mark Munoz Get to Lyoto Machida?

The card has been chopped and changed, and swapped around, but the main event for UFC Fight Night 30 in Manchester, England has now been filled. “The Filipino Wrecking Machine,” Mark Munoz, will take on Lyoto Machida, who is making his middleweight deb…

This is not an easy matchup for Munoz. Taking on the elusive Brazilian will be a challenge.

Munoz has an exceptional wrestling pedigree, and in his fights he’s a grinder who looks to take things to the mat and proceed with strikes. That’s likely to be his game plan going into this fight. However, no one has used that strategy successfully against Machida before.

The real question going into the fight is whether or not Munoz can get close enough to “The Dragon” to take him down.

Machida is the most elusive and difficult-to-grapple-with fighter in the division. He’s also used to dancing circles around accomplished wrestlers; a list which includes Randy Couture, Dan Henderson, Ryan Bader, Rashad Evans, Jon Jones and Phil Davis.

Those last two were fights he lost, but even then, both Davis and Jones struggled to put Machida on his back. He’s proven time and again that he has some of the sturdiest takedown defense and quickest feet to easily neutralize the style of game Munoz will bring.

What’s more, both Davis and Jones had reach as an advantage, helping them close the distance on Machida. But Munoz is slightly smaller. Worse, he’s never shown the explosive takedown ability that can cut the distance on a man like Machida.

We’ve seen the shortcomings in Munoz’ wrestling in his fight against the much bigger, Chris Weidman.

Still, that was a year ago, and you’d hope that Munoz would have patched some of those holes in his game—not that he’s likely to face many takedown attempts coming from Machida.

What could ultimately slow Machida down is the weight cut. This is unknown territory for the Brazilian, and whether he can keep things standing and pick Munoz apart depends on how strenuous the weight cut is for him. Otherwise, for Munoz to get close to him, he would require a willingness to trade in the pocket and hope he can find a way into the clinch or score a takedown from there.

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