Georges St. Pierre vs. Jake Shields

The UFC's otherwise-extraordinary 129 show from the Rogers Center in Toronto ended on a flat note when Georges St-Pierre and Jake Shields fought to an uneventful 5 round decision. While St-Pierre once again demonstrated his ability to outclass the world's best 170 pounders without placing himself in significant danger, his fourth straight victory without a stoppage failed to ignite the largest live audience in the promotion's history.

Widely considered the game's premier strategist, St-Pierre once again had fans wondering how he would elect to engage with Shields, the BJJ-oriented specialist with a significant standup disadvantage. The answer proved straightforward as St-Pierre kept the fight on the feet, peppering Shields with a stiff jab out of the gate and offering no surprises or misdirection. The first two rounds settled into Shields taking the worse of cautious exchanges. St-Pierre would land and dart away as Shields looked increasingly unsure of how to proceed.

The prospect of a finish looked promising for St-Pierre until a solid jab from Shields to the left eye of St-Pierre damaged the champion's eyeball, obscuring his vision and changing the course of the fight. Wholly unable to see out of his left eye, St-Pierre withdrew into a shell for the remaining three rounds. He informed his corner of the damage and head trainer Greg Jackson instructed him to simply fight on. With his depth perception impaired, St-Pierre turned cautious in his strikes. He also began mixing in takedowns to keep Shields at bay, proving in the process that he could take the former Strikeforce champion down at will but had elected not to. But Shields began to have real success on the injured champion. He continued to take worse than he gave, but was landing jabs of his own that were doing damage.

By midway through the fourth both men were bloodied, Shields from the nose and mouth and St-Pierre from the bridge of his nose. The action, however, was failing to boil over as Shields refused to press and GSP refused to endanger himself for a finish. The crowd grew restless as the fifth played out in similar fashion, with Shields having perhaps his best round of the fight on a champion that had clearly decided to play it safe and retain his title for another day.

The scores were read out as 50-45, 48-47 and 48-47 for the reigning champion, Georges St-Pierre, who apologized for his failure to finish yet again to a sympathetic home crowd. While the 50-45 scorecard saw it otherwise, the majority scorecards snapped GSP's extraordinary streak of 30 straight rounds won in a row, giving the challenger from team Cesar Gracie not one, but two rounds on the night and something of a moral victory. Unfortunately for Shields, he failed to take the sort of significant risks on the night that would get the champion down to the canvas, where Shields could use his best weapons to try to finish.