Another fight weekend is here, baby, and we love to see it. Saturday marks the last stop on the UFC schedule before next week’s UFC 263 pay-per-view, an absolutely stacked card with two title fights. What they’ve given us is one of the weakest UFC shows in a long time, filled with snoozer heavyweight fights and guys you’ve never heard of.
Still, I’m gonna be watching it, because I’m a freak. So, here’s a look at the three fights I’ll be watching closest on Saturday night.
Muslim Salikhov vs. Francisco Trinaldo
I have little to no interest in the fights that are headlining Saturday’s UFC show, to be honest with you. As a main event, they’ve given us what should be an absolutely ponderous heavyweight fight between Jairzinho Rozenstruik – fresh off just a brutally ineffective performance against Ciryl Gane in February – and Augusto Sakai, who was last seen gassing badly and getting knocked out by the corpse of Alistair Overeem last year.
And while I’ve always been a Walt Harris booster, I’m not exactly on the edge of my seat waiting for his co-main battle with Marcin Tybura either. But when you scan the rest of the show, really look into it deep, there’s actually some neat stuff to watch. For instance: buried deep in the prelims you’ll find my favorite fight of the night, a welterweight matchup between Sanda master Muslim Salikhov and the ageless Francisco Trinaldo.
It’s weird to call Salikhov a prospect, since he’s 36 years old, but one still doesn’t feel like he’s quite reached his level in the UFC. One of the most successful sanda strikers in the history of that art – Salikhov is a five-time world champion with a kickboxing record listed at 185-13-1 – Salikhov has won four straight in the Octagon, and is establishing himself as a very, very tricky striking matchup.
Sanda is a Chinese form of kickboxing characterized by flashy, spinning kicks, foot sweeps and tosses, and rapid successions of close-in strikes. You see those skills when Salikhov is in the Octagon, but he’s mainly fought as a patient, cerebral counter-striker, who’s flashed some significant knockout power in his early UFC career.
The great Jack Slack did a terrific job breaking down Salikhov’s game earlier this week:
Salikhov has flashed some real promise, but the jury is still out on whether he can be a real contender at 170, especially at his age. The time to make a run is right now. And what better type of guy to absolutely torpedo someone’s run than the single most dangerous kind of fighter in the world: an Old Brazilian Motherfucker?
42-year-old Francisco Trinaldo has been a pain in the ass for the UFC lightweight division for nearly a decade. Now, he’s moving up to be a pain in the ass for the UFC welterweight division, and he can probably wring another decade out of that too. His nickname, “Massaranduba,” comes from a tree native to the Amazon rainforest noted for its durability. There cannot be a more perfect nickname for Trinaldo.
If I have any designs on making a quick rise up the rankings, Trinaldo is exactly the kind of fighter I’m avoiding like the plague: tough as nails, extremely experienced, powerful and built like a brick shithouse. He’s a billion years old but is somehow seemingly exactly as good as he was in 2012. And in August, he beat the piss out of Jai Herbert so badly that people were calling for referee Herb Dean’s head afterwards.
Trinaldo is absolutely unkillable, and has never fully gotten his due. Getting by this tough old bastard will mean a lot for Salikhov’s career trajectory – beating a guy like Trinaldo means something. If Salikhov beats Trinaldo, he’ll likely get a pretty decent name next. Hopefully Trinaldo is afforded the same opportunity.
Santiago Ponzinibbio vs. Miguel Baeza
Fighting is a cruel sport, and there are plenty of great what-might-have-been stories in the history of MMA. TJ Grant, who was next to fight for the UFC lightweight title in 2013 before concussions ended his career. Chris Holdsworth, who was undefeated and looking like a future bantamweight star before retiring abruptly. Even fighters like Brock Lesnar and Cain Velasquez, who reached great heights but were kept by health issues from showing us just how legendary they could be.
In 2021, I desperately fear that Santiago Ponzinibbio could be one of those what-might-have-been stories. Ponzinibbio marauded through the UFC welterweight division from 2015-18, going on a seven-fight win streak that captured the imagination. Powerful, tough and aggressive, Ponzinibbio looked like a world-class ass-beater. And at the end of 2018, Ponzinibbio blasted Neil Magny to pieces in front of a Buenos Aires crowd that was absolutely roaring for him. His star was made.
At that moment, Ponzinibbio was one, perhaps two, wins away from a world title shot. He then disappeared off the face of the Earth. Recurring health issues, including a life-threatening infection that had him in and out of the hospital throughout most of 2019, cost him over two years of his career right when his stock was peaking and he was in his prime. When he finally returned, in January, we just hoped to see a few glimpses of the fighter he was. Instead, he looked slow and tentative, and Li Jingliang knocked him stiff with a left hook in the first round.
Almost three years after he made himself one of 170’s most in-demand rising stars, Ponzinibbio is now in mortal danger of becoming irrelevant. Perhaps shaking off the rust and getting into the Octagon for the first time after his long layoff will help him dial back in. It better, because it’s not going to get much easier from here.
That’s because Ponzinibbio is now matched up with one of the most talented young prospects at 170, undefeated 28-year-old Miguel Baeza, who has finished all three of his UFC opponents since signing with the company in 2019. Tall, long and athletic, Baeza has the physical attributes you want to see. He flashed KO power in stoppage wins over Hector Aldana and Matt Brown. And in November, he brought his black-belt jiu-jitsu skills to the table against Takashi Sato, finishing him with an arm-triangle in the second round.
Baeza has a sharp, well-rounded skillset and seems to mix everything together extremely well. Now, he’s putting Ponzinibbio in an unfamiliar position: that of the gatekeeper. Ponzinibbio, even after all these years, still carries something of a name. Baeza, on his own rise, is trying to take it from him. The stakes cannot get more desperate.
Jairzinho Rozenstruik vs. Augusto Sakai
OK, fine, I’ll talk about this main event a little bit, if only because the UFC has this really annoying fixation on making Jairzinho Rozenstruik a thing. A Surinamese kickboxer with one-punch KO power, “Bigi Boy” rolled to a 10-0 pro record as the calendar turned over to 2020, having knocked out his first four UFC opponents. He very quickly had become one of the UFC’s top-ranked heavyweights, and considering the promotion’s fascination with putting heavyweights in prime spots, that meant we were going to see a whole lot of Jairzinho Rozenstruik from here on out.
Here’s the issue, if you actually look at his record, his run looks a lot less impressive. His last three wins in the UFC have come against Andrei Arlovski, Alistair Overeem and Junior dos Santos – all legendary heavyweights, but all years past their prime by the time they fought Rozenstruik. In the Overeem fight, he was outworked handily for almost five full rounds before catching the Dutchman with a Hail Mary punch.
And the two times he fought anyone at or near the top of their game, Rozenstruik didn’t look like he belonged. In May of last year, current world champ Francis Ngannou sent Rozenstruik to the Shadow Realm in just 20 seconds. And against Gane in February, Rozenstruik looked like he was stuck in quicksand. Gane danced around him, jabbed him and threw leg kicks for five rounds, almost completely unchallenged. Rozenstruik couldn’t lay a finger on him. Gane received a fair bit of criticism for that bore of a fight, but why would he try to slug it out and put himself at risk when the guy he’s fighting isn’t threatening him in any way?
Rozenstruik has great power and some technical striking chops, but he looks too slow to really contend at the highest level. He goes through too many long periods as a static counter-striker, and doesn’t offer much against fighters who are really quicker than him. Sakai, for his part, fights with a bit more output, but has fallen prey to the same bug of inactivity.
The No. 9 contender in the UFC heavyweight division, Sakai is a Contender Series product who started 4-0 in the Octagon from 2018-19, showing a strong Muay Thai base and decent mobility. But against Overeem, his issues really came to the fore: Sakai hurt him early, went for it, but couldn’t put him down. (Sakai lacks top-level KO power, which is an issue at heavyweight.) He got tired, started standing still, and let Overeem get back into the fight. Overeem then took him down and bashed him with ground-and-pound before earning a fifth-round stoppage.
Both fighters have enough tools to look impressive against the lower ranks of heavyweight, but that’s one of the most talent-bare stretches of the UFC. When the competition has stepped up, they’ve been exposed. Now, one of these two fighters is going to drop from the ranks of the contenders decisively. I guess those are some stakes, at least.
The Big Fight 