What mattered most at UFC on ESPN+ 5 on Saturday in London? Here’s a thing or five …
1. You mickey-fickeys act like you forgot about Jorge Masvidal
All that talk about Darren Till’s big left hand, who knew it was Jorge Masvidal’s that would end up being the fight-ender? Well, maybe Masvidal knew all along. All week leading up to this matchup, even in Till’s backyard, he seemed to be trying to find ways to let us know that you forget about his presence in this division at your peril. Just because he’s been in this sport since the backyard brawling days of Kimbo Slice, it doesn’t mean he’s even close to done.
Let the quickness with which the London crowd fell silent be a reminder to welterweights everywhere. When you invite Masvidal to your homecoming party, there’s a good chance he’ll spoil it all and walk out with the loot.
2. After the party it’s the after-party …
The way Masvidal told it later, he went walking up on Leon Edwards backstage with his hands behind his back to demonstrate his non-threatening intent. Somehow, Edwards must have got the wrong idea when he saw Masvidal coming at him with a what-did-you-just-say look on his face. Imagine that.
The next thing you know, Masvidal is hitting Edwards with “the three-piece and a soda,” and the UFC has a backstage brawl caught by ESPN cameras.
Just how upset about this turn of events is the UFC? Company president Dana White expressed the usual dismay on Twitter afterward, though he seemed to suggest that it was the UFC staff that needed to improve – not the fighters. And if you’re in the business of selling violent animosity, maybe stuff like this just makes your job easier. (See also: McGregor v. Bus, 2018.)
We’ll know the truth of the matter once the UFC decides on a response. Especially if that response effectively doesn’t exist.
3. Oh right, Leon Edwards had a fight, too
Edwards out-wrestled and outworked a game Gunnar Nelson, and now Edwards is sitting on a seven-fight winning streak in the UFC. While the names on his hit list have gotten impressive lately, the victories themselves risk being somewhat forgettable. Edwards is the kind of fighter a lot of welterweights would probably rather avoid: he can make you look bad, and it won’t be much fun to watch.
Maybe a guy like that could benefit from a genuine feud. Being on the receiving end of the three-piece with a soda lends itself to just that sort of development.
4. Perhaps after a split-decision win isn’t the time to call out the most dominant champ
The good news for Dominick Reyes is that he gets to wake up on Sunday morning still unbeaten. The bad news is that this time, as the repugnant Calvin Candie might say, he muddled the line between winning and losing.
Reyes edged out Volkan Oezdemir by the slimmest of margins on the scorecards after a very close fight. So when he followed that up by warning UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones that he was coming for him, well, there’s a chance it didn’t exactly strike fear in the heart of the sport’s best fighter.
But hey, Jones wants to stay busy, right? And he’s knocking off all the other contenders, so maybe Reyes will get what he wants sooner rather than later. Then he’ll get to find out if he still wants it.
5. The verbal submission that wasn’t?
Danny Roberts insisted that he hadn’t made any noise that should constitute a verbal submission while he was caught in Claudio Silva’s third-round armbar. Referee Kevin Sataki seemed to think otherwise, as he jumped in to call off the fight with less than 90 seconds to go.
Was Roberts robbed of a victory? Well, maybe not. He was down 20-18 on two of the three judges’ scorecards, and it’s not like he had Silva in deep trouble when the fight was called. Mostly what he was doing was trying to survive, and possibly making the kinds of noises that could be too easily misunderstood.
It makes for an unsatisfying ending, but I’m not sure it qualifies as one of the greater injustices we’ve seen. It’s not even the greatest submission-related injustice of the last month, to be honest.
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