Sign up for ESPN+ right here, and you can then stream the UFC live on
your smart TV, computer, phone, tablet or streaming device via the
ESPN app. A
Ultimate Fighting Championship clash many considered to be a
dream matchup may be finally coming to fruition in 2021. The report first coming from
MMA Fighting on Thursday, Carlos
Condit (31-13) will be coming to blows with Matt Brown
(22-17) at a UFC card in 2021. The Jan.
30 Fight Night event, which may take place on Yas Island, Abu
Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, will be gaining a potential all-action
scrap once scheduled all the way back in 2013. According to MMA
Fighting, the two have both agreed to meet, but the paperwork is
still outstanding.
The two welterweight thrillers were booked to fight at UFC on Fox 9
in 2013, but a back injury to Brown scrubbed the pairing. At that
time, Condit had bounced back from consecutive losses to Georges St.
Pierre and Johny
Hendricks to finish Martin
Kampmann. In the meantime, Brown was in the midst of a
six-fight win streak that had seem him beat names like Stephen
Thompson and Mike Swick on
the way up the welterweight rankings. In 2018, the promotion
attempted to pit the two against one another again, but another
Brown injury – this one a torn ACL – scuttled the long-awaited
match. The two have amassed 13 combined post-fight bonuses
throughout their UFC tenures.
In his last time out, Condit earned his first victory in 2015 when
he captured a hard-fought decision over Court McGee.
His win by decision – just the third in his career – snapped a
five-fight skid where he had been submitted three times. The former
World Extreme Cagefighting king will be looking
to lift his UFC record to .500 with a win, and he will almost
certainly be seeking a finish. “The Natural Born Killer” maintains
a sky-high finish rate of 90 percent throughout his career, with a
nearly equal number of knockouts and submissions to his credit.
The similarly violence-minded Brown has not gone the distance since
2015. A finish defeat against Miguel
Baeza in May ended a two-fight knockout streak where “The
Immortal” posterized Diego
Sanchez and Ben
Saunders. Brown one-ups his prospective opponent by posting a
stellar finish rate of 91 percent, and only winning two bouts on
the scorecards in his career. That last win on the scorecards
coming over Thompson in 2012, since then, Brown’s last eight wins
have come by stoppage.
The UFC Fight Night card on Jan. 30 will take place either at the
UFC Apex in Las Vegas or on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, depending on
what the promotion can arrange. The event does not yet have a
headliner, although another key bout scheduled for the card is a
women’s flyweight tilt between Roxanne
Modafferi and Viviane
Araujo.
