Did you watch the show though? Do you know the context?
I'm not trying to call you out, if you saw the whole thing, you saw it and that's your judgement, fair enough, dude.
But we had another main card fight where Thanh Le and Kang Tai were looking for openings, and they both got shown yellow cards - TWICE.
Kang Tai was the aggressor and I heard him asking Herb Dean why he got a yellow card in the first round, and Dean made whatever excuse he made.
What the fuck did he, or ONE, expect Kang Tai to do? He was walking down Le, and Le was looking for openings and body kicks and the like cognizant that he'd been KO'd the fight before by this very same dude.
What an absolutely absurd situation that he's getting two yellow cards and fined a large portion of his fight fee because someone was clearly shitting their pants about entertaining the Qatari crowd.
Look, I put in the PBP that referees acting like that was equivalent to having the officials hold up "THIS FIGHT/SHOW SUCKS" banners. It made no sense, it wasn't warranted, and it was a disgrace. I know some people will automatically like any measure that might lead to more action, but this show sucked because of the desperation. And the cards didn't even fucking work.
Yeh, I watched the whole show.
I'm not trying to call you out here either, mate, just having a discussion, but what context are you referring to? That they were debuting in Qatar and wanted to have a strong showing? I'm only looking at each fight individually. It wouldn't have mattered if the card was back in Thailand. The refs would have still been handing out those cards. I've seen them hand out yellows when the guys were actually engaging quite a bit.
I'm honestly surprised Bhullar was allowed to not fight for as long as he did.
The Le/Kang fight wasn't as bad, and I don't really understand why Kang got the cards either. Sure, he was doing a lot of not-engaging himself, but it's a lot harder when your opponent is mostly avoiding you like Le was. I thought Kang getting the cards was wrong. I understood the background of the fight and why Le was more timid than he might have been, but at the end of the day, he still just wasn't engaging enough, despite numerous feints and the odd kick.
The way I see it, both ONE and the fighters are at fault.
ONE have their ruleset, and they're welcome to do it their way. But if that's the case, there's no reason to even have Bhullar when they knew full well he could have "fought" like that. He was mostly shit-scared against Anatoly as well recently. He had another hard hitter in front of him in this fight, so there was always a decent chance that he'd be terrified again. It was dumb matchmaking and roster management.
Le/Kang was another unfortunate matchup considering the previous fight, but it was a unification bout, so there wasn't really any avoiding it.
If ONE don't want those sorts of "fights", then they need to either not have those fighters or make those matchups. That was their fuckup.
On the other hand, the fighters know full well what ruleset they're fighting under. They know about the cards. Bhullar knew he was doing absolutely fuck all and Le knew he wasn't engaging enough.
If fighters want to come into ONE and not engage enough, then ONE really just isn't the place for them. And it's not like this is some new ruleset. ONE have been like this forever. The fighters know what's required of them.
And the cards did half work. Sure, Bhullar didn't do anything and just kept not fighting in there until the DQ, but Kang got aggressive and finished the fight like 2.5 mins after Herb handed out the second set of yellows.
I don't know why Chatri is saying that's the first time they've ever handed out a red card for inactivity either, because I'm almost certain they gave a red out to another sloppy HW in the third round of a fight. He'd actually done a ton more fighting than Bhullar did too.
