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MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

Serhiy Sidey was happy to walk away from UFC Edmonton with a victory, although he didn’t think he was going to when the final horn sounded.

Sidey faced Garrett Armfield in a preliminary bantamweight bout on Saturday’s Fight Night card at Rogers Place in Edmonton, Canada. After three rounds, Sidey was awarded the split decision win, which much of the MMA community didn’t agree with.

“That was a very close fight,” Sidey said in his post-fight scrum. “First two rounds, very close, I might’ve edged those out. Lost that third round. When the judges were scoring the scorecards, personally, I thought I lost. I’ll be honest.

“I’ve got to re-watch that fight. I know I hurt him bad in the first two rounds, had some very close submissions, I got a split decision win today.”

Armfield, as expected, wasn’t thrilled with the two judges that scored it for Sidey, going as far to joke in a since-deleted tweet that someone should “investigate these judges” and tagging UFC CEO Dana White and Donald Trump. He later made it clear that he wasn’t serious.

Despite the controversy, Sidey officially has a UFC victory on his résumé. After earning a contract on Dana White’s Contender Series with a controversial knockout win against Ramon Taveras, the UFC rebooked the pairing at UFC 297, and Taveras earned a split decision victory.

For Sidey, he’ll chalk off Saturday’s fight with Armfield as a win and a lot of valuable lessons learned sharing the cage with someone he respects.

“Garrett came out and that was the hardest fight I’ve ever had, I think,” Sidey said. “He mixed up his wrestling really well and good boxing, the strongest 135er I’ve ever fought, for sure. That dude had some crazy strength.

“A lot of things I can learn from this fight. I want to come back stronger.”

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MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

The fact that Kyle Redfearn wanted to keep fighting after the doctor stopped his bout at BKFC 68 says a lot about his toughness.

On Saturday, Redfearn faced Danny Moir in a preliminary bout at BKFC 68 in Newcastle, England. Though Redfearn found success early in the bout, Moir was able to overcome a few difficult moments and turned up the punishment in the second round.

With 10 seconds left in Round 2, the damage to Redfearn’s face piled up so much that the doctor had to take a look. After seeing the brutality staring back at him, he had no choice but to stop the fight.

Check out the absolutely gnarly image of Redfears face in the video below.

Moir improves to 2-0 in BKFC promotional bouts. The Tyne and Wear fighter earned a decision victory over John Ferguson at BKFC’s Prospect Series fight card in June. Moir also has 28 pro boxing bouts to his name.

Redfearn is a veteran of 16 pro MMA bouts, and competed for the first time since a boxing match in 2017.

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No Title Fight?
| BJPenn.com

Ilia and his brother were no strangers to scrapping in the streets of Rustavi, Georgia growing up, according to a book written by their mother.

What does Ilia Topuria know about the streets? More than some of his haters would think, it seems.

Leading up to his UFC 308 victory over Max Holloway, Topuria seemed to be beefing with half the Russian fighters on the roster due to comments about Islam Makhachev. “El Matador” expressed interest in fighting the lightweight champion but specified it would be in the cage, not the streets.

“When did you ever fight on the street European boy?” was the response from Mak’s teammate and Bellator lightweight champion Usman Nurmagomedov.

That became a repeated line across social media and forums during fight week, and one media member even asked Topuria during media day what he knew of street fighting. Topuria refused to answer, but not because he didn’t have experiences to share.

According to Topuria’s mother, Ilia and his brother Aleksandre were forced to fight on the streets of Rustavi, Georgia regularly.

“It was not rare, it was a daily routine,” she wrote in a new book about her son (translated by Giorgi Kokiashvili). “Whenever they were in the streets, they were fighting. Imagine: multiple boys would appear … they would come and tell you that they wanted your hat or your belt. There were three ways – giving up, running away and fighting.”

“Ilia and Aleksandre always preferred to fight, and at the end of the day, they always had their hat and belt.”

“It was not about the things,” she wrote. “It was about securing and defending their place in the streets … The way to their biggest championship belts started with keeping their own, ordinary belts in the streets of Rustavi.”

Not that we think anyone should be encouraging all this talk of street fighting. The UFC has been lucky that their relatively recent hands-off approach to unsanctioned attacks and brawls hasn’t resulted in any serious injury. They might not be so lucky when the added tensions between Russia and Georgia are added into the mix.

The last thing we need is some situation where things go horribly sideways, especially involving the UFC’s next potential breakout star. But for the record: Topuria is no stranger to defending himself on the streets.

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MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

Herb Dean wants to have a conversation with Joe Rogan, and the rest of the UFC 306 broadcast team after the UFC’s event at Sphere.

The veteran referee was the third man in the octagon for the main event between new bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili and Sean O’Malley. In the closing rounds, Dean repeatedly told Dvalishvili to work more on the ground while in top position. Rogan called Dean’s tactics “insane,” and was quite critical of Dean down the stretch. While speaking on JAXXON Podcast, Dean reacted to the situation, and knew when he started getting negative comments flung his way on social media it came from commentary criticism.

“I’m not sure if I totally understand that myself,” Dean said. “I think the analysts who started it — and I don’t want to be critiquing those guys, or have an adversarial relationship because, first of all, they say a lot of good things about me, and they have over the years.

“I would like to talk to them… the commentators. I can tell it was the commentators before I even heard that it was because on social media, I was getting a lot of the same thing. … I see a bunch of grown men saying somebody else’s opinion, must’ve been something the analysts said, and it was.”

Dvalishvili ultimately won the fight, and the title via unanimous decision in a bout that the MMA community won’t have on their Fight of the Year lists. Dean was also part of a couple of other strange moments in the bout — including Dvalishvili yelling at O’Malley’s head coach Tim Welch seconds into the contest, along with telling Dvalishvili to stop kissing O’Malley’s back prior to the end of a round.

But it was Rogan’s comments from the commentary booth, more so, that got Dean most of the negative attention after UFC 306.

“They’re saying that I shouldn’t be telling the guys to work,” Dean explained. “This is something I’ve always done. Our sport, there’s rules that are there for safety. There’s rules that are there for fairness, we have rules that are there to build our sport. To make our sport what it’s supposed to be. To make our sport more exciting. …

“Most of the coaches can say my pre-fight instructions with me because I say the same thing. I tell them about things we have problems with. Most of them know the rules… but to this stuff, two things that are the most important things before I intervene: The biggest intervention is when I’m going to start your fight. So you always hear me say, ‘Fight back. Fight back.’ That lets them know so it’s not a surprise to them. … The next thing I’m going to say is, I’m going to say ‘work.’ And that means that I’m about to take your position away. Because in this sport we have position, and a position can lead to a fight being finished, but when I say ‘work,’ that means what I’m looking for is not just busy work, I’m looking for effort to finish the fight.

“Instead a bunch of [tapping] punches, where you could do a full five-minute round with this and not change, I’m expecting you to posture, throw bigger shots. Instead of trying to hold on, I’m expending you to spend energy advancing position, passing guard, or if you’re up against the fence, putting energy into a takedown. Something that’s going to bring the fight to a conclusion.”

For newer fans learning the nuances of the wild sport that is MMA, Dean lays it out as simple as possible as to why he issues warnings for these types of scenarios.

“If you have a superior position, if you’re not using it to win the fight, you’re using it to hide from your opponent to burn time,” Dean said. “That’s not what we want our sport to look like, I don’t think.”

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