One of Leon Edwards major mistakes that cost him

[Pequeño Corey]

If the fight was at 5pm instead of 5am, Leon would still be champ.

Midnight Leon wins that fight easy

 

[DomiDomi]

Leon made many mistakes

1. When the ref says go, he should be sprinting to the centre to ensure he doesn't give up any yards to start the round. Make Belal work for every bit of ground he gains. Instead Leon just let's Belal be first to the centre and already starts the round at a disadvantage.

2. He could be shooting his own takedowns, firstly to make Belal hesitant to just keep walking forward, and secondly because he proved when he was the one initiaiting the takedowns, he could be the one dominating the grappling. When you get two top level guys, the better grappler is almost always the one who's initiated the takedown, as they're usuaully the one on top.

3. Not throwing enough strikes to deter Belal's endless forward pressure. If you go 10 seconds without throwing a strike, that's 10 seconds where Belal can walk forward unopposed. 10 seconds of Belal gaining ground results in Leon's back to the cage, and once his back's on the cage he's cooked. He should be throwing straight kicks and punches to the body.


You do have to say Belal's shots were fast and well timed because Colby/Usman weren't having nearly as much success with the takedowns against the cage vs Leon.

 

[Fahcough]

WW version of the WNBA championship.

 

[Yep]

A lot of reasons that Leon was beaten. Basically, Belal was just better of course. However, it was surprising to many, including myself, because Edwards had soundly beaten high level wrestlers like Usman and Covington.

Of course the biggest reason were the countless takedowns that Leon couldn't stop from the very first round. Which, again, was confounding because his takedown defensive had been stellar prior to this fight. Much credit to Belal, looking like a poor man's WW Khabib. (only reason he wasn't quite WW Khabib because he did get reversed a few times).

One huge mistake that I thought hadn't been mentioned enough was Leon's inexplicably terrible cross guard defense. I am a former amateur boxer and coach and I had been very impressed with Leon's boxing in the past. However, I was shocked to see him so poorly employ the cross arm defense, sticking his right elbow way out and keeping his right hand extended, exposing his chin completely to uppercuts. Belal rocked him HARD with that uppercut right through that opening from the very first round. I felt that hurt Leon badly and thus compromised his takedown defense. The takedowns came continuously as a result, then the head spike and it was complete dominance by Belal. An impressive all around performance by Belal.

Except his post fight speech. Man, can that guy be any more boring? He just won the title after years of being overlooked and bypassed. There's the whole hometown booing and hating on him. He had the Palestinian conflict to be passionate about. He would have played a villain against the crowd, or a hero spokesman to his people. But man, that guy is so bland and boring.

It also helped him be even more vulnerable to belal shooting in. He looked horrible. I don’t even understand what his training consisted of. He’s standing there with both arms raised awkwardly. At one point he even basically took away his own sight. Very strange tactic indeeed.

 

[Yep]

It looked like he had drilled the cross guard his entire camp and wanted to use it at as much as possible even if it was the right choice or not because he thought it looked cool or something lol

And it most definitely didn’t look cool. He looked about as awkward as could be

 

[Yep]

I was also surprised he was eating those uppercuts. I'm assuming they thought that guard would make him harder to take down, but that makes no sense to me. Arms high, upright stance, vision obscured... if someone can explain what advantage they thought it offered against a wrestler, I'd love to hear it.

If someone truly thought that was a good defense they need to be fired immediately

 

[World eater]

If the fight was at 5pm instead of 5am, Leon would still be champ.

It was 5am for Leon, but 10pm for Belal.