The UFC’s last pay-per-view offering of the year was an absolute joy from top to bottom, ending the year with a bang and leaving fight fans with plenty to be excited for 2021. With four knockouts in a row and zero controversy on the judges’ scorecards, it would be difficult to find a fan that left this event feeling short-changed or unsatisfied and many victories on this card could have major implications for the UFC matchmakers in the months to come.
Emotional Swanson steals Pineda’s hype:
In the featured preliminary bout of the night, Featherweight veteran Cub Swanson returned after ACL surgery to take on Daniel Pineda, who thrust his name into notoriety at 145lbs with an impressive TKO victory over the promising Herbert Burns in August.
It was clear that Pineda had a target in that surgically repaired knee as ‘The Pit’ would invest a considerable amount of his offence into heavy lead leg kicks, leaving Swanson buckling at points.
After some slick exchanges on the ground, with less than a minute left in the opening round, Swanson would escape Pineda’s clutches and drop his opponent with a stiff right hand that Pineda would seemingly never recover from.
The fight was largely competitive up until that point, but the knockdown just seemed to take all of the sharpness out of Pineda’s game as he appeared flatfooted, stunned and his attacks looked deliberate and easy for the Southern California native to evade.
Swanson would spend the rest of the fight just picking his shots and two minutes into the second round, he would end the fight with a three-punch combination to earn a KO win after a long layoff.
In his post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, when questioned on how satisfying his victory was coming off of an injury, Cub said he always kept thinking about his kids and being their superhero, while fighting back tears.
The victory pushes Cub up to second in Featherweight victories in the UFC/WEC, only one win behind Jose Aldo.
Five wins in seven months for ‘Trailblazer’:
On the main card, surging Middleweight and Dana White’s Contender Series alum Kevin Holland squared off against Ronaldo ‘Jacare’ Souza.
With Holland himself admitting that his grappling is probably the weakest part of his game and Jacare being referred to as ‘BJJ royalty’ during his walk to the octagon, it looked to be a strong test to determine the true potential of the outspoken fighter who Dana White himself named ‘Bigmouth’.
The fight would not last long as with about a minute gone, Holland would attempt a standing guillotine choke which Souza would slip out of and drop himself and Holland to the ground, landing in his opponent’s guard.
If any uninitiated fans needed a sample of how much of a talker the California native is, he responded to ground and pound strikes by Souza not with punches but with compliments, saying, ‘That was nice Jac, that was nice too’.
It would not be the only bit of verbal sparring done on the ground by Holland as he then admitted to Souza, ‘You know, I had a dream about this’. At this point, any fight fan that was claiming Holland to be all talk was immediately silenced as from his back, Holland would stun Jacare with a right hook and would get up and finish the fight on his dazed opponent, bagging himself a $50,000 Performance of the Night bonus to boot.
Kevin Holland has truly had an incredible 2020. The win over the Brazilian legend is his fifth of the year, with his first win of the year coming in May and among those wins, he’s managed to finish the fight four times.
Oliveira dominates to join Lightweight title picture:
The co-main event of the evening was host to a matchup between two elite fighters in what is arguably the UFC’s most competitive division as former interim champion Tony Ferguson took on number seven ranked Charles ‘Do Bronx’ Oliveira.
This fight served as a massive opportunity for Oliveira as the Brazilian has managed to put together an eight-fight win streak coming into this bout and over the past year has accused the top five fighters in the division of refusing to fight him, saying that the top five only fight each other as they are scared to lose their spot.
Ferguson, who hadn’t fought since his bloody war with Justin Gaethje for the interim Lightweight championship in May, was looking to return to the old ‘El Cucuy’ often being called the division’s ‘Bogeyman’ and hoping that a typical brutal Ferguson victory would put him back in the title conversation.
What unfolded however was as shocking as it was impressive as Oliveira absolutely dominated Ferguson, almost finishing the fight at the end of the opening round with a sickening armbar which bent Ferguson’s arm in the wrong direction but ‘El Cucuy’ was able to endure until the horn to signify the end of the first round forced Oliveira to relinquish the hold and leave viewers once again stunned at the toughness and resolved of Tony Ferguson.
Unfortunately for fans of the fighter, that toughness would not translate to a comeback victory as Oliveira would be comfortable wherever the fight ended up. Oliveira would leave Ferguson with no answers, particularly on the ground, en route to a unanimous decision victory, with all three judges also scoring one of the rounds a rare 10-8 to Oliveira.
Fight of the Year contender ends in a draw:
The main event was a matchup between UFC Men’s Flyweight Champion Deiveson Figueiredo and the division’s number one contender, Brandon Moreno. Just by stepping into the Octagon, the two men would accomplish the rare feat of fighting on consecutive UFC pay-per-views and Figueiredo would break the record for the shortest turnaround between title defences, with only 21 days since his victory over Alex Perez, eclipsing the previous record of 56 days.
The two fighters would not show any fatigue from their respective victories just three weeks prior as the fight had the typically frenetic pace of a Flyweight, with the added bonus of featuring arguably the division’s two strongest strikers.
The turning point of the fight came in the third round as ‘Deus de Guerra’ accidentally caught the challenger with a kick to the groin that would have left many male viewers wincing. An incident such as this would usually pass without much issue, the victim of the foul gets five minutes to recover and the fight is then resumed. However, as Figueiredo had already been warned about poking his opponent’s eyes earlier in the fight, referee Jason Herzog elected to deduct a point from the champion.
It was as if Moreno realised the opportunity that he was given with this advantage on the judges scorecards as he poured on the pressure in the fourth round, hurting the champion multiple times and executing two strong takedowns, which were met with considerably less resistance than in the earlier rounds.
The final round to this incredible fight unfortunately didn’t boast much action as both fighters were understandably exhausted from the war that they had just put each other through. The champion was arguably the busier of the two fighters in the final frame but neither fighter was able to make a convincing statement at the end of the fight to argue their superiority.
So, when the judges’ scorecards came back with scores of 47-47, 47-47 and 47-46 in favour of Figueiredo, resulting in a majority draw, there could be little protest as both fighters put on a career-defining display in a fight that Dana White would later call the greatest in the division’s history.
Many fans of the champion will be quick to claim his superiority as if it were not for the deduction, Figueiredo would have scored a unanimous decision victory, but a silver lining to this decision is that after both fighters have recovered, it is likely that we will see an immediate rematch, potentially igniting a rivalry that could come to define the new era at 125lbs in a division that was dangerously close to being scrapped entirely after years of fan apathy.
What makes this result even more impressive for the champion is that in his post-fight interview, he claimed to have been hospitalised with pains in his abdomen until 2 AM the night before the fight, a claim that was later corroborated by Dana White.
What’s next?
As this was the last pay-per-view offering of the year, Dana White was predictably coy about future plans with the fighters featured on the card but that did not stop Kevin Holland from seemingly playing matchmaker for himself.
In his post-fight interview, Holland called out fellow 2020 breakout star Khamzat Chimaev for a fight at next weekend’s Fight Night card, the last UFC event of the year. Chimaev was originally scheduled to face number three ranked Welterweight Leon Edwards but that matchup has reportedly been postponed to January 2020 due to Edwards testing positive for COVID-19.
While this fact may seem to pour cold water on any conversation of a Holland-Chimaev clash, Chimaev has fought at Middleweight this year and broke the record for the quickest turnaround between fights at ten days, so adding this fight to what is an already stacked 2020 curtain call could bring a final spike of hype before December 19th.
In terms of an aging fighter potentially on his way out of the sport, former UFC Heavyweight Champion Junior Dos Santos suffered his fourth consecutive knockout loss to Cyril Gane in the opener of the main card, leaving many media members at the post-fight press conference to question if we had seen the last of JDS, with White cryptically saying, ‘possibly’.
Finally, the UFC’s maiden pay-per-view event of 2021 will feature the return of one of the sports biggest ever stars as Conor McGregor takes on Dustin Poirier. The card also features two high level bouts in the UFC’s Women’s divisions in a Flyweight bout between Jessica Eye and Joanne Calderwood and a Strawweight fight between Amanda Ribas and Marina Rodriguez.
Full card results:
Main Card
Flyweight – Deiveson Figueiredo (c) and Brandon Moreno fought to a majority draw
Lightweight – Charles Oliveira def. Tony Ferguson via Unanimous Decision
Women’s Strawweight – Mackenzie Dern def. Virna Jandiroba via Unanimous Decision
Middleweight – Kevin Holland def. Ronaldo Souza via KO (Round 1 – 1:45)
Heavyweight – Cyril Gane def. Junior dos Santos via TKO (Round 2 – 2:34)
Preliminary Card
Featherweight – Cub Swanson def. Daniel Pineda via KO (Round 2 – 1:52)
Lightweight – Rafael Fiziev def. Renato Moicano via KO (Round 1 – 4:05)
Featherweight – Gavin Tucker def. Billy Quarantillo via Unanimous Decision
Women’s Strawweight – Tecia Torres def. Sam Hughes via TKO (Round 1 – 5:00)
Early Preliminary Card
Featherweight – Chase Hooper def. Peter Barrett via Submission (Heel hook, Round 3 – 3:02)
The Inbound Observer 