Winner: Running It Back
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Derek Brunson knew exactly what to do.
Within seconds of dispatching main event foe Darren Till via submission, the 37-year-old middleweight was on his feet and declaring his next career move to the nearest available camera.
“Izzy Adesanya, you next, boy,” he bellowed. “You next.”
If it comes off, it won’t be the first time.
Adesanya and Brunson tangled at UFC 230 in November 2018, a bout Adesanya won by first-round stoppage in his penultimate victory before becoming middleweight champion five months later.
He’s since defended four times and still hasn’t lost at 185 pounds.
Brunson can’t claim the same pristine track record, but he’s been awfully good since, earning his fifth straight post-Adesanya win with the uber-impressive stoppage of Till in a fight that was never close.
“Derek Brunson needed to fight a good fight and win impressively,” Cormier said.
“He did what he does best. He’s in great shape. He’s winning at a rate he’s never won before. It’s time to see him with Adesanya again.”
Indeed, the fifth-ranked contender and former Division II college wrestling standout got the fight to the mat in every round, taking his seventh-ranked foe down and battering him with ground-and-pound shots that left his eye blackened and his confidence waning after just five minutes.
More of the same followed in Round 2, and Till, in fact, didn’t have a real moment of success until early in the third, when he landed a jab-cross combination from the southpaw stance that drove Brunson backward to the cage.
But the stricken fighter was able to get in close in the aftermath of the combination and again grabbed hold of Till and got him to the ground, eventually getting to his back and locking in the rear-naked choke that ended matters at 2:13 of the third.
It was his fourth career win by rear-naked choke and Till’s first submission loss since he was beaten by then-welterweight champ Tyron Woodley three years ago.
“I’m tired of these guys not mentioning my name,” said Brunson, who entered the fight as an underdog despite his higher ranking. “I’ve been busting my butt for years after my loss to get back to this point.”
Adesanya is penciled in for a second fight with the man he beat for the middleweight title, Robert Whittaker, but Brunson said he’d rather not take a fight in the interim before getting his shot.
“I’m not broke. I’ll sit and wait,” he said. “It’ll give me five, six months to get my body right.”
Winner: Impressing the Royalty
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This just in: Tom Aspinall is the real deal.
The 6’5″, 247-pound Englishman was the more athletic and more fluid commodity from the outset of his heavyweight bout with Serghei Spivac, spearing his Moldovan opponent from long range before getting a stop with a highlight-reel combination in close after just 150 seconds.
“The kid’s real, man,” an obviously impressed Cormier said. “He’s the real deal.”
Aspinall prompted the comments with his 11th finish in 11 pro wins, drawing his 14th-ranked foe into a clinch before hammering him with a right knee to the belly followed by a right elbow to the head.
An instantly bloodied Spivac reeled backward and fell to the mat alongside the cage, where he was bombarded with 10 more hard shots before referee Mark Smith pulled Aspinall off at 2:30.
“I’m extremely happy,” Aspinall said. “Every time I get in this place I’m goddamned scared to death. but the fear is how I express myself.”
Aspinall, who’d been ranked 13th, is 4-0 in the UFC with four finishes.
“I just want to fight someone ranked above me, If I’m No. 13, gimme No. 12,” he said. “This was pretty sweet, actually. I’m ready, man. I’m ready.”
Spivac lost for the third time in seven UFC fights, ending a three-fight win streak.
“He just seems like he’s born and bred to be in there,” Cormier said.
Winner: Hitting the Target
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Khalil Rountree Jr. is a finishing machine.
He’d arrived at Saturday’s fight with Modestas Bukauskas with six stoppages in nine wins, so the idea that he’d get a seventh in their light heavyweight bout was hardly shocking.
But the method might have been a surprise.
Bukauskas managed to survive a barrage of predictably heavy punches through a one-sided first round, from which he emerged with a rearranged nose and blood covering his face and lower torso.
So when he began the second in an upright position, it seemed a positive.
Little did he know, however, Rountree was looking for a different opportunity.
The 31-year-old waited for Bukauskas to initiate an exchange with a left jab and then stepped forward with a right kick directly to his foe’s leg, buckling the knee and immediately drawing an intervention from referee Herb Dean at the 2:30 mark as Bukauskas dropped to the mat in obvious distress.
Bisping said a cageside physician told him the Lithuanian’s ACL, MCL and PCL were probably “blown.”
“I came in here ready to get the job done,” Rountree said. “I didn’t work it in training camp with the intent that I threw it today because I wanted to make sure my training partners were safe.
“But I saw that when he threw a jab he was very heavy on the front foot. I wanted to counter that.”
Winner: Justifying the Hype
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Conor McGregor isn’t done yet.
But the UFC may have found itself another star Saturday.
English power puncher Paddy Pimblett made his Octagonal debut in the opening bout of the main card and backed up nearly every bit of his pre-fight chatter, stopping Brazilian foe Luigi Vendramini in the final minute of the first round of a scheduled three-rounder.
“What did I tell you?” he reminded Bisping in the cage after the fight. “Me and you would be having this conversation after a first-round knockout.”
The prophecy came true after a tumultuous four-plus minutes that included Pimblett being knocked sideways by a counter left hand from Vendramini in the first minute. He went to the floor but quickly rose, weathered some follow-up shots and began landing his own punishing blows soon after.
“He carries his hands low for a reason,” Bisping said, “because it allows him to throw punches from a different angle.”
Pimblett scored with a hard right uppercut at the four-minute mark and was quick to punch, chasing his stricken opponent across the mat while firing blows in succession. A wide right hook provided the finale to a seven-punch barrage and dumped Vendramini to the floor as Smith intervened at 4:25.
It was the 17th win in 20 pro bouts for the 26-year-old, a former Cage Warriors champion who turned down UFC opportunities in 2016 and 2018.
“I’m here to take over,” he said. “I’m the new cash cow. People are going to be calling me out.”
Winner: Prolonging the Rebound
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It wasn’t looking good for Julian Erosa.
The featherweight was a successful veteran of multiple smaller promotions before arriving in the UFC on the heels of a winning performance on Dana White’s Contender Series in the summer of 2018.
Then, things went bad.
Erosa dropped his first three bouts as a full-time performer in the Octagon, losing by a unanimous decision and a pair of stoppages within the first 11 months.
He’d also been beaten by stoppage in a one-off appearance on the UFC 196 undercard in 2016.
A one-fight return to the CageSport promotion yielded a victory in February 2020 and a UFC return four months later, which seemed to be just what the career doctor ordered for the Washington native, now 32.
He stopped Sean Woodson in the final round in that reappearance and then built on the win with a first-round erasure of Nate Landwehr in February 2021.
A loss to SeungWoo Choi on a Fight Night show in June could have signaled another downturn, but Erosa instead made it three out of four with a third-round D’Arce choke submission of catchweight foe Charles Jourdain in an entertaining scrap at 150 pounds.
Erosa won the first round thanks to efficient body work, while Jourdain evened things up in the second with a series of effective lead lefts, including a shot that yielded a knockdown.
An Erosa takedown led to the decisive moment in the third, as he locked in the choke while Jourdain was scrambling to get up. He tapped soon after at 2:56 and was finished for the first time in a career stretching back to 2016.
“You plan something out and then when that plan comes to fruition the way that you planned it, it’s really satisfying,” Erosa said. “I knew once we were toward the end of the fight, my cardio, my conditioning, my size and my strength and my experience were going to take over. And sure enough, that’s what happened.”
Loser: Following the Script
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It didn’t just feel like a quick afternoon in Las Vegas.
It was a quick afternoon in Las Vegas.
The Fight Night show was culled to just nine bouts thanks to a raft of changes in the days and hours leading up to the show’s open just after 2 p.m. ET.
COVID-19 protocols were responsible for two of the adjustments—prompting a women’s flyweight bout between Ariane Lipski and Mandy Bohm to be rescheduled for September 18, while a men’s flyweight bout matching Alex Perez and Matt Schnell has been moved to December 4.
A bantamweight bout pitting Jonathan Martinez against Marcelo Rojo was scrubbed entirely when Martinez was not medically cleared to compete.
And, as mentioned earlier, the heavyweight co-main event took on a different look after Sergei Pavlovich was removed from the card because of visa issues. He was replaced by Spivac, who arrived to meet Aspinall as the UFC’s 14th-ranked heavyweight following two wins earlier in 2021.
UFC Fight Night 191 Full Card Results
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Main Card
Derek Brunson def. Darren Till by submission (rear-naked choke), 2:13, Round 3
Tom Aspinall def. Serghei Spivac by TKO (punches), 2:30, Round 1
Alex Morono def. David Zawada by unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 30-27)
Khalil Rountree Jr. def. Modestas Bukauskas by TKO (kick), 2:30, Round 2
Paddy Pimblett def. Luigi Vendramini by TKO (punches), 4:25, Round 1
Source: Bleachreport
