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#2 Best: Pereira produces the best showing of his UFC career
As legendary rockers Guns N’ Roses once sang, all you need is just a little patience. Judging by his excellent showing last night, UFC Welterweight Michel Pereira evidently took Axl Rose’s wise words to heart.
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‘Demolidor’ thoroughly beat Zelim Imadaev in all areas before finishing him with a rear naked choke with just over 20 seconds to go in the third round of their fight. It was the best performance of his short UFC career by a mile, and it was no coincidence that it was by far his most patient, too.
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Gone were all the wild flips and tricks and while Pereira still came to entertain – throwing flying knees and shuffling like Muhammad Ali at times – it was clear that winning was the main thing on his mind. He kept a much slower pace than he’d done in the past, picked his shots, and generally outclassed Imadaev from start to finish.
The beautiful finish – a German suplex that led directly to the choke – was just the icing on top of the cake.
The feeling around ‘Demolidor’ was always that he probably had the raw tools to get to the top of the UFC, but was too focused on behaving like a wildman to actually make it. That may well have changed judging on last night’s performance.
The UFC should push him up the card once again because if he keeps fighting like this, they’ve got a star on their hands.
#3 Best: St. Preux uncorks one of the best KO’s of 2020
Ovince St. Preux came into his fight with Alonzo Menifield as a betting underdog, but quite why that was, I have no idea. ‘OSP’ had far more experience than his raw, hard-hitting opponent and Menifield’s style had already been exposed somewhat by his last UFC loss, a grinding defeat to Devin Clark.
In the end, we found out exactly why those odds were horribly wrong. The shorter Menifield simply couldn’t get close enough to St. Preux to land any of his bombs, and throughout the first round ‘OSP’ seemed content to keep his foe at bay with kicks.
Menifield decided to switch things up in the second round, opting to charge at St. Preux instead, and that turned out to be a mistake. Showing shades of his brilliant 2014 knockout of ‘Shogun’ Rua, ‘OSP’ simply shifted his weight and caught the oncoming Menifield with a picture-perfect left hook.
The prospect went crashing to the ground face-first, and St. Preux didn’t even need to follow up. To make things even sweeter, this was the 11th finish of St. Preux’s UFC career – giving him a record in the Light-Heavyweight Division.
We’ve seen some great knockouts in 2020, plenty of them on this series of behind-closed-doors shows, but this was definitely one of the prettiest.
#4 Best: Muniz saves us from a Fabinski special
One of the effects of having a shorter card last night was that all seven fights were shown on a truncated ‘main’ card. That meant that the UFC Middleweight bout between Andre Muniz and Bartosz Fabinski – which should’ve headlined the prelims – had much more of a spotlight on it.
For viewers, that was somewhat concerning. Fabinski is an excellent, battle-hardened fighter, but it’s not too unfair to say that he isn’t the most entertaining. Coming into last night ‘The Butcher’ held a 4-1 UFC record, but had never finished any of his fights, and seemed to be carrying the torch once held by smothering wrestlers like Jon Fitch and Josh Koscheck.
When he took Muniz down early in their fight and avoided a guillotine choke from ‘Sergipano’, it looked like we could well be in for fifteen minutes of takedowns and grinding. However, the Brazilian clearly has plenty of submissions in his arsenal – and quickly transitioned into a triangle choke and then into a fight-ending armbar.
This finish was a thing of beauty, some of the smoothest grappling we’ve seen in the UFC in some time. It was also a bonus in terms of giving the viewers a beautiful tapout where to be honest, one wasn’t expected. ‘Sergipano’ probably earned himself a lot more fans last night, and that’s only a good thing.
