3 reasons why Silva vs. Sonnen will suck
In hyping UFC 117’s main event, the UFC is doing their best to convince fans that Anderson Silva vs. Chael…
In hyping UFC 117’s main event, the UFC is doing their best to convince fans that Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen won’t be as painful to watch as Silva’s last three middleweight title defenses against Demian Maia, Thales Leites, and Patrick Cote. Sonnen has the perfect style to beat Silva (so the story goes) and Chael’s outlandish trash talk might even inspire the champion to actually handle his business in the cage for a change. Do you buy it? I’m not quite convinced yet — personally, I think all the factors that made Silva’s fight against Maia so awful are also present in the Sonnen matchup — but in the interest of fairness, I figured I’d lay out both sides of the argument. First, why Silva vs. Sonnen will be another infuriating bust…
1. Silva Will Want to Avoid the Mat at All Costs
From a technical perspective, what made Silva’s fights against Demian Maia and Thales Leites so dull? Silva understood that those fighters posed their only threats on the ground, and he simply refused to allow the fights to go in that direction, which is something you can get away with when you’re a genius on your feet….read more
2. Silva Doesn’t Handle Insults Well
We all want to believe that Silva will respond to Sonnen’s trash-talk with brutality. That’s kind of how this narrative goes — Chael has been throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest, and he’s about to get stung the fuck up. Oh, if only. After UFC 112, Ed Soares explained Silva’s odd performance by saying Anderson felt personally disrespected by the things Maia said before the fight….read more
3. Silva Doesn’t Consider Sonnen a Worthy Challenger
One of the most common explanations for Silva’s horrible showings in his recent middleweight title fights is that he’s bored. Could there be something to that explanation? Perhaps the reason Anderson has sleepwalked through every 185-pound fight since his battle with Dan Henderson in March 2008 was because he hasn’t fought anybody like Dan Henderson since then. Cote, Leites, and Maia could all be described as one-dimensional fighters who didn’t have a mandate on #1 contendership….read more
