Fighters Only

Issue 176

March 2019

The third month of the year started with the UFC’s first trip to Las Vegas of 2018 with UFC 222 on March 2.

The pay-per-view main event booking woes continued with Max Holloway pulling out of a UFC featherweight title fight with Frankie Edgar just a little over two weeks before the event.

Cris Cyborg stepped up to the plate at short notice and she made light work of the then Invicta FC bantamweight champion Yana Kunitskaya. The Brazilian finished the job in the first round in a performance where she again showed the gulf in class between her and many of the other women currently competing at the highest level.

Whilst the headline bout was unremarkable, UFC 222 was notable for the younger talent that was on display. Brian Ortega stepped in at short notice to face Frankie Edgar and he stopped the former UFC lightweight champion for the first time in his career after landing a devastating uppercut in the first round.

Ortega’s performance in the co-main event caught the headlines, but victories for Sean O’Malley, Mackenzie Dern, Ketlen Vieira and Alexander Hernandez quietly put a younger generation of stars on the map and all four would go on to have noteworthy years.

Two weeks later, UFC Fight Night London hosted a heavyweight main event featuring former champion Fabricio Werdum and Alexander Volkov.

Not many fans expected the Russian to finish Werdum in the style that he did, but it was Paul Craig’s last-gasp win over debutant Magomed Ankalaev that had everyone talking afterwards. The Scotsman’s UFC career was hanging by a thread as Ankalaev dominated him for four minutes 59-seconds of their light heavyweight undercard bout, but just when it looked like it was curtains for Craig, the Scot latched on a triangle choke and made the Russian tap out with just a second left on the clock.

The 02 Arena in London erupted at the sight of Craig pulling off an unlikely win and for a long time, it looked like it would be the most spectacular finish to a fight in 2018.

Yair Rodriguez, however, had ideas of his own come November.

In Poland, there was a landmark moment in the history of Polish promotion KSW when its middleweight champion, Mamed Khalidov, was defeated for the first time in eight years when he was submitted by Tomasz Narkun. It would prove to be the beginning of the end for Poland’s most celebrated MMA icon.