What were the biggest moments from this UFC Fight Night? What’s next for one of the bantamweight division’s top contenders? Jeff Wagenheim, Marc Raimondi and Brett Okamoto offer their takeaways from UFC’s return Saturday night’s fight card.
Cory Sandhagen made 14 takedown attempts and was unsuccessful on every one of them until there was barely a minute to go in Round 4 of Saturday’s UFC main event in Las Vegas. It doesn’t sound like a winning strategy, does it?
Well, it was. By regularly threatening to take the fight to the canvas, Sandhagen essentially disarmed Song Yadong, transforming him from a dangerous puncher into a defensive wrestler. Every moment Song spent sprawling to fend off a shot was one in which he wasn’t unleashing his potent offense.
“Rob the guy of his power, you know?” Sandhagen said. “He’s a hell of a striker.”
Song did get that striking attack going at times, especially in the first two rounds, when he knocked Sandhagen backward a couple of times with straight right hands. But it was Sandhagen who landed the telling blow, an upward lead elbow in Round 1 that opened a nasty gash above Song’s left eye. The bleeding and swelling got worse as the fight wore on, and just before Round 5 began, referee Herb Dean waved it off on the advice of the cage-side doctor.
Sandhagen so crafty with his elbows. Can throw them from anywhere, and come from such unconventional angles #UFCVegas60
— Henry Cejudo (@HenryCejudo) September 18, 2022
Sandhagen was disappointed by that. “I think that he deserved a fifth round,” he said. “I wanted to see the fifth round. I wanted to see the scorecards to see if I was winning or not.”
As it turned out, he wasn’t. Had the fight gone on, it would have entered the final round up for grabs. Two of the three judges had 38-38 scorecards.
But Sandhagen did his job to end the fight. When the fighters spoke briefly before the verdict was announced, Song appeared to tell Sandhagen that the streaming blood left him unable to see out his…
Source : espn
