The 10 greatest UFC fights of the last decade (2010-2019)

2013: Gilbert Melendez vs Diego Sanchez – UFC 166

UFC 166's fight between Diego Sanchez and Gilbert Melendez was unbelievable.

October 2013’s UFC 166 is arguably the greatest UFC show of all time, and a great part of why it’s so highly regarded is the presence of 2013’s best fight, the wild Lightweight clash between Gilbert Melendez and Diego Sanchez. Both men promised a war coming in – playing up their Mexican backgrounds – and a war was exactly what they delivered.

From the off, both men came out firing punches at one another, and while it was Melendez who was the more accurate of the two, catching ‘The Nightmare’ and bloodying him up early in the fight, it was clear that Sanchez was going nowhere and that his chin could hold up to anything that ‘El Nino’ could throw at him.

Incredibly, in the third round Sanchez was still coming forward despite taking inhuman punishment, and when Melendez landed on him, he simply roared him on. With the deafening crowd behind him, somehow Diego managed to drop Melendez with an uppercut, stunning everyone – but he couldn’t finish him off, and the fight went to the judges, who awarded Melendez a unanimous decision.

In the end though, this was a fight with no true loser; Melendez came away from it with a huge new contract and a title shot, while Sanchez’s reputation as perhaps the most exciting fighter in UFC history was only enhanced. It remains an all-time classic today.