Lawler retains title in epic battle
Strong final round allows champ to keep his UFC welterweight championship belt
Seemingly down on the judges’ scorecards and with his title on the line, Robbie Lawler stood and slugged it out for his UFC welterweight belt in a hectic fifth round for the ages on Saturday night.
Somehow, Carlos Condit took everything the champion threw at him and when the final bell rang, both men stood leaning against the cage, barely able to stay on their feet.
Minutes later, the judges announced their decision and Lawler was still the UFC’s welterweight (170-pound) champion.
Another fifth round, another comeback.
“Carlos is a hell of a fighter and he comes from one of the best camps in the world,” Lawler said after the UFC 195 main event. “He had a great plan tonight and we battled it out, but there were two winners tonight.”
With the win, Lawler has now defended the belt he won by beating Johny Hendricks in late 2014 twice, with both victories coming in instant classics.
In July, he was in a similar situation against Canadian Rory MacDonald, but made sure the judges’ scorecards were irrelevant by finishing the challenger.
On Saturday night, he couldn’t get the finish, and there will no doubt be questions as to how Lawler could have been judged to be ahead when he was getting out-struck by a nearly 4-to-1 margin heading into the fifth.
After the final round, though, there will be few who will bemoan having to watch Lawler defend the belt. He rushed forward from the opening bell and threw massive blow after massive blow at Condit, who was staggered on several occasions, but kept throwing counterpunches and never dropped to the canvas.
“Carlos is so tough, every time I see him fight he proves everyone wrong and proves how tough he is,” Lawler said. “He was everything everyone said he was.”
DUFFY DOWN
In the wake of Conor McGregor’s win over longtime featherweight champion Jose Aldo last month at UFC 194, some recent UFC history has been up for revision.
The men who fell at McGregor’s hands, after all, are getting a second look. If the champion could dispatch Aldo in only 13 seconds, maybe getting knocked in the first round by McGregor last year wasn’t such an indictment of Dustin Poirier’s skills after all. And what of Joseph Duffy, the Irishman who dispatched of McGregor in just 38 seconds when they met in 2010?
On Saturday night at UFC 195, Duffy and Poirier took their moments in the spotlight and delivered a fascinating back-and-forth duel.
For the victorious Poirier, the win provided a third-straight win in the UFC’s lightweight division — his loss to McGregor was at featherweight — and a legitimate claim to a spot somewhere in the 155-pound division’s Top 10.
“I was more surprised that he didn’t get cut,” Poirier said when he was asked if he thought he was close to finishing the fight in the second. “I felt the bone in his forehead multiple times, but I was the one bleeding.”
For Duffy, the loss showed there’s plenty of room for improvement where takedown defence is concerned, but he’s got the raw tools to hurt anyone and in Montreal’s Tristar Gym he’s working at the right team to fix those holes.
NEXT CHALLENGER?
Stipe Miocic has been begging for a shot at the UFC’s heavyweight title for ages.
On Saturday night, he may have left the organization no choice but to give him his chance.
Miocic picked up the biggest win of his career in the UFC 195 co-main event, knocking out No. 1 contender Andrei Arlovski just 54 seconds into the first round.
Miocic had expected to get the winner of Cain Velasquez’s title defence against Fabricio Werdum at UFC 188 in Mexico City in June of last year, but the organization opted to go with a rematch of that fight instead.
That left him needing to prove himself once more, and on Saturday he showed stunning knockout power but tagging Arlovski with a shortright hand and then following up by cracking the former champion with shot after shot until the referee stepped in.
He followed the win up by screaming ‘Give me my shot’ over and over again at UFC president Dana White, and was largely incomprehensible as he demanded a shot in his postfight interview.
Velasquez and Werdum are scheduled to fight in the main event of UFC 196 next month in Las Vegas.
STREAK OVER
There’s no way to put this lightly: December was a terrible month for Canadian fighters in the UFC.
Everyone from Elias Theodorou to Sarah Kaufman to Randa Markos to John Makdessi lost their bouts, and with Valerie Letourneau coming out on the losing end of her women’s strawweight title fight with champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk at UFC 194 in November, it was getting hard to feel optimistic about the state of Canadian MMA as 2015 came to a close.
Fortunately, Sheldon Westcott decided to put an end to the lousy stretch of results and start 2016 off with a bang.
Westcott picked up his first UFC win with a gorgeously timed takedown of Edgar Garcia and then used his superior ground game to pound his opponent and get a stoppage at just the 3:12 mark of Round 1.
The Edmonton native lost in his UFC debut to Theodorou at the Ultimate Fighter: Nations finale and then dropped his bout with Pawel Pawlak last year at UFC Fight Night: Krakow.