MMA analyst Chael Sonnen has given his thoughts on those suggesting that Khamzat Chimaev‘s approach at UFC 319 was boring.
In the main event of UFC 319, Khamzat Chimaev dominated and defeated Dricus du Plessis. ‘Borz’ used his superior wrestling to completely overwhelm du Plessis from start to finish, and in doing so, he earned the right to call himself UFC middleweight champion.
Of course, there are always those who are going to try and take away from what Khamzat Chimaev achieved. Some have even said that they found his style quite boring which, in itself, sounds like a strange take.
Chael Sonnen recently gave his thoughts on this idea.
Chael Sonnen’s view on Khamzat Chimaev ‘boring’ claims
“The boring one in that fight was Chimaev and the one to blame in that fight was Chimaev, followed by the referee. Now, I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking, ‘Okay, fine. Yeah, I guess Dricus is the third person that we blame.’ No. Find me an article. You’ll never find it. You will never find an article. Dricus has not even been mentioned, even though he was in there for the exact same amount of time. He’s not even mentioned. Fault has fallen to Chimaev. Fault has then fallen to the referee.”
“From the beginning of this sport, if there’s a boring match, the boring match will only go to the victor. I mean, this is very consistent. I had a teammate, Matt Lin, who fought and beat Phil Baroni, and Matt got labeled boring and got pulled off TV. He’s so boring. And Phil Baroni, who was in the same contest, just not doing as well, that’s why he lost the contest, was labeled as one of the sport’s most exciting. Two guys in the same fight: one boring, other most exciting. You just kind of wonder how’s that possible.”
“I’m just wondering what part of it was so bad. In many ways, he fights the way Islam fights and the way Khabib fought. Those are compliments. Matt Brown said, with complete respect, he fights a lot like Georges—which was the biggest draw in all of pay-per-view, which meant people liked the way that he fought. So what exactly was the problem?”
“Was the ground-and-pound not vicious enough? Was it not mean enough? Did you need to see Dricus get hurt—not just dominated? Was dominated not enough? There’s no wrong answer, and I’m not trying to trap you right now. I’m just trying to have an open dialogue on if we’re going to change a rule so that doesn’t happen again, what rule is it that we would change?”
