UFC 261: Usman vs. Masvidal 2

Ariane Carnelossi   vs.   Na Liang 


So you didn't have to--and I hope you appreciate this--I did watch the limited tape available for both women, and my thoughts are as follows:


Currently in both rural Brazil and China, there's two surly, mean-spirited cowherds living parallel lives, having both decided their two firstborn daughters being too unpretty for viable commercial prostitution sold them to a glorified violence pirate posing as a modern-day lanista for the price of a pack of smokes and a big mac, and indeed bought both post-sale and don't regret the transaction at all. If you were to ask either of them about it, they'd simply shrug, give you the finger and go back to mucking out the stables, puffing on corn-cob pipes the entire time.


The women were transported in hobnailed wooden crates to a training facility; a simple one-door barn featuring haystack bedding and a crackly television manufactured in 1996 duct-taped to a wall which played Ronda Rousey highlights in a loop. This being both the total extent and means of their instruction, the women were expected to watch and replicate what they saw from anywhere from nine to fifteen hours per day, and implement what they had learned into their sparring sessions. This process was rigorously overseen by their trainer and benefactor with one narrowed eye ( the other having been lost in a knife fight with a Taiwanese fisherman) between playing cards and shelling peanuts, who smelled heavily of sloe gin, and didn't know anything about Martial Arts apart from his limited experience of bar fights and what the Television repeated.


If the women managed to produce marginal replications of the display, he'd toss them lumps of sugar and Pork Koo, and they would receive doubled helpings of mash in the evenings, which was mixed-through with very badly synthesized HGH brewed in a bathtub by a sooty man out of a nearby tin shanty. Neither man knowing how to correctly apportion dosages, they would simply guestimate--the litmus test for overdose-requiring-tapering-off being when the women's chins grew brushier and/or their voices deeper than theirs. Should they have performed badly, they were beaten with a broom handle and sent to bed supperless, save whatever local species of moth could be captured flittering about their candle-lit quarters.


I do not know the length of time this training persisted, nor via which channels the women found their way into the UFC. It is telling however that their signing coincided with a sex holiday Sean Shelby undertook in the region. As for who wins, I have it on Good authority that Na got the better of the grappling exchanges, and was typically able to bring Vargas down. In striking they were supposedly approximately of equal skill.


Liang, dec.

* Edited at 04.05.2021, 8:18 PM ET *

Anthony Smith   vs.   Jimmy Crute  


I tried to think of a worse matchup for Smith and couldn't do it. This is an absolutely horrendous fight for him and I would venture to say it has the most possibility of resulting in him experiencing career and mind-ending harm of any bout that possibly could have been made. This is a far more dangerous fight for Lionheart than Jones was.


Crute is better everywhere, but he's almost certainly going to end it from the top. For Anthony's sake I hope by sub. Honestly I think Jimmy at -200 is a value bet because I abso-*******-lutely think he's got more than a 66% chance of not only getting the W but getting it in violent fashion here. Surely the odds of that happening are in 80+% range. I think this will be less competitive than Joe Biden vs  a staircase or a teleprompter-free cogent sentence.


Definitely worth a bet, will have to look at prop lines.