Another fight weekend is here, baby, and we love to see it. This weekend’s action features of plenty of MMA shows but relatively little good MMA: we have offerings from the UFC, Bellator, PFL and RIZIN over the next few days, but the actual interesting fights on any of those cards are really few and far between.
Still, violence is violence, and that means it’s time to watch some face-punching. Here’s a look at the fights I’ll be watching closest over the next few days:
Ciryl Gane vs. Alexander Volkov, UFC Vegas 30
I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot recently, but while the UFC Fight Night show on Saturday night looks really pretty damn weak, they’ve at least come through on giving us a good main event. Since the ascension of Francis Ngannou as champion of the world this spring, the UFC heavyweight division has hit a stall: the UFC tried and failed to negotiate a bout between Ngannou and Jon Jones, and while Derrick Lewis is expected to be the next man up, it doesn’t sound like negotiations are going great there either.
Such is life when you lowball everyone with zero wiggle room. But at the very least, we’ll have another new top heavyweight contender minted on Saturday night, when the next big thing at the UFC’s biggest weight class – lightning-quick Frenchman Ciryl Gane – meets easily the most compelling threat he’s ever faced on his undefeated rise towards the top.
Over the course of his very quick arrival as one of the best heavyweights in the world – Gane debuted as a pro in 2018 and has only eight professional fights to date – we’ve learned a few things about him. First, he’s a heavyweight who fights like a featherweight – fighters who are 6-foot-5 and nearly 250 pounds shouldn’t be able to move like that. Secondly, he has fantastic technical Muay Thai striking. Thirdly, he’s not necessarily concerned with giving the fans what they want.
Gane received his first-ever UFC main event in February against Jairzinho Rozenstruik, and it became apparent immediately that Gane’s plodding opponent was out of his depth. Rozenstruik has a lot of power and can be fun to watch when he lets his hands go, but Gane made him look like he was stuck in molasses. There was absolutely zero chance that if Gane stayed on the outside, that Rozenstruik would ever pose a threat to him.
So Gane just stayed on the outside. He circled, hit him with jabs, hit him with low kicks. Rozenstruik never turned up the intensity and was never able to catch Gane at all. In turn, Gane didn’t feel the need to turn up the intensity or give the fans a show. He coasted to a lopsided decision, and afterwards was met with some criticism for playing it safe – although in a sport as dangerous as MMA, if you can play it safe and still win, that’s undoubtedly the smart thing to do.
All the time, you watched and wondered: what would happen if someone could get Ciryl Gane into an actual fight? Gane’s skill and style are silky smooth, but he hasn’t really been tested that much in the UFC: three fights against unranked opponents who were out of their league, a washed-up Junior dos Santos, and a completely ineffectual Rozenstruik. Let’s give Ciryl Gane a man who can bring the heat. Let’s give him a man who might be able to touch him first. How about let’s give him goddamn Alexander Volkov?
Play the distance game with Alexander Volkov at your own risk. The 32-year-old Russian is 6-foot-7 with an 80-inch reach, and he hits like a Mack truck. Volkov has bulked up significantly over the last couple years, and over his last two fights – both KO wins – he’s looked like an absolute killer. The legendary Alistair Overeem‘s chin had actually held up well in recent fights before he met Volkov in February, but their clash looked like a slow execution. It was scary. Every single strike Volkov landed look like it hurt Overeem badly, before he finally put him away two minutes into the second round.
Volkov has only lost twice in the UFC, to elite opposition: to Lewis by last-second KO in Oct. 2018 – your typical Derrick Lewis fight, where he was losing until all of a sudden he won – and to Curtis Blaydes by decision in a five-round main event last June, where Blaydes took Volkov down repeatedly in the first three rounds, then had to desperately hang on when he got tired and Volkov didn’t.
Volkov’s takedown and grappling defense are the glaring weakness, and Blaydes – one of the heavyweights most equipped to exploit that weakness – exposed it in their fight. But when he’s standing, Volkov’s mixture of reach and power make him very, very dangerous. Gane has showed some tricky grappling so far in his career, and it will be interesting to see if the Muay Thai star tries to shoot takedowns. If not, Gane may finally be in for the real test of his striking abilities that we’ve all bee waiting to see.
Raoni Barcelos vs. Timur Valiev, UFC Vegas 30
Get on the Raoni Barcelos train before you get called a bandwagoner. People talk about how crazy deep the UFC bantamweight division is all the time, but let’s put it in perspective: the 34-year-old Brazilian is 5-0 in the UFC, with some truly revelatory performances, and he still isn’t in the top 15. That may change very soon.
Barcelos caught a ton of attention for his performance in November, when he put all his skills together in a fantastic display of mixed martial arts to beat Khalid Taha by unanimous decision. Afterward, the UFC tried to put him in there with a ranked opponent. They wanted to book him with wrestling machine Merab Dvalishvili for a quick turnaround the next month, but Barcelos wasn’t recovered enough from the Taha fight. They then tried to book him with veteran Raphael Assuncao in February, but Barcelos tested positive for COVID and the bout was scrapped.
So, they threw their hands up and put him in there with Timur Valiev, in a fight that’s still one of my favorites on this UFC show. I want to see if Barcelos can give us another glimpse of the fighter we saw against Taha. He looked like the complete package: a very accomplished grappler and wrestler in Brazil and a BJJ black belt, Barcelos mixes his skill on the mat with striking that has looked phenomenal at times. Barcelos flowed tremendously against Taha, mixing all his weapons, picking his shots perfectly, and busting his opponent up on seemingly every part of his body in between sections where he’d dominate him on the ground.
I was not the only one who came away from that performance thinking that Raoni Barcelos could be the next big thing. We still need more high-level reps to see if it’s for real, though. That’s why it’s a shame that the fights with Dvalishvili or Assuncao didn’t come through. And that’s not to slight Valiev, himself a good fighter with some high-level success. He’s just not proven on the level Barcelos’ other prospective opponents are.
Valiev is officially undefeated in the UFC, but that comes with an asterisk: Trevin Jones knocked him out in Valiev’s debut in August, but the fight was overturned to a no-contest when Jones failed a drug test for weed. Valiev – who previously spent a number of years as a very successful mainstay of the WSOF/PFL – rebounded with a very dominant performance against Martin Day in February.
If anything, Valiev will have something he can test Barcelos with: the 31-year-old Russian has a high-level sambo background and his takedowns and top control game are formidable. Of course, Barcelos also has some excellent grappling skill. If this hits the mat, which I hope it does, we could be in for some very interesting action.
Lance Palmer vs. Movlid Khaybulaev, PFL 6
I haven’t done a whole lot of coverage of the PFL since this season has started – to be honest, it’s been kind of a disaster, with constant fight cancellations and postponements in between genuinely weird shit happening – but it’s been notable for one thing: the favorites losing, all the time. The PFL signed Fabricio Werdum to anchor its heavyweight division, only to watch him get knocked out by Renan Ferreira in his debut – later overturned due to circumstances so bizarre that it would take me a couple paragraphs to detail. It also signed Anthony Pettis to anchor its lightweight division, only to watch him get busted up by Clay Collard in his debut.
It wasn’t just their hot free agents eating surprise losses. It’s been their longtime favorites. Two-time defending lightweight champion Natan Schulte lost his first-ever PFL fight to UFC vet Marcin Held. Defending light heavyweight champ Emiliano Sordi had to scrape into the playoffs by the skin of his teeth. And perhaps most shockingly, in April, Lance Palmer – a two-time featherweight champion before the WSOF rebranded, and who had never lost in a PFL cage – got beat.
It was kind of poetic how it happened, too. In a previous life, Palmer was a star wrestler for the Ohio State Buckeyes, but kept running into a guy who was just a little bit better: Penn State’s Bubba Jenkins, who handed Palmer a few notable defeats on the mat. Although Palmer ended up a multiple-time All-American, he never won a national title – Jenkins did, as a senior in 2011. Palmer had a chance to right those wrongs in April, when they met again on the first night of the PFL season. Instead, Jenkins outwrestled him yet again, outstruck him on the feet, and handed the king of the PFL a humbling defeat.
The result is that, for the first time, I’m actually invested in a Lance Palmer fight. Palmer has been notorious for boring decision after boring decision throughout his career – he takes you down and lays on you. But now, thanks to the quirks of the PFL format, to avoid getting eliminated from the PFL tournament he needs to do something he hasn’t done in a very long time: win via first-round stoppage. And he needs to do it against a guy who’s showed a talent for violence in the past.
Movlid Khaybulaev was one of the more intriguing talents in the featherweight division heading into the season, a good wrestler with much more aggressive finishing instincts than Palmer, an undefeated record, and some nice names on his resume. Khaybulaev himself has some good wrestling skills, which he used in a mauling of Lazar Stojadinovic in his first fight of the season.
Palmer has caught guys in early submissions in the past, but you have to go back a while – his most recent such win was a 2015 first-round neck crank of Chris Horodecki. Khaybulaev will not make it easy at all. I’ll give this to the PFL – their system is weird and may not fit great with MMA, but in this case, it’s adding some drama. Lance Palmer’s gonna have to actually go for it! I can’t wait to see what that looks like.
Honorable mentions: Renato Moicano vs. Jai Herbert, Michel Prazeres vs. Shavkat Rakhmonov, UFC Vegas 30; Timothy Johnson vs. Valentin Moldavsky, Liz Carmouche vs. Kana Watanabe, Bellator 261; Anthony Pettis vs. Raush Manfio, Kayla Harrison vs. Cindy Dandois, PFL 6
The Big Fight 