12: 37 AM ET
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Jeff Wagenheim
It modified into once the identical frail Cyborg. It modified into once a tag-current Cyborg.
Cris Cyborg placed on one other dominant efficiency in a occupation plump of them, and added a current twist by scoring her first submission victory in 26 skilled bouts, choking out Arlene Blencowe to efficiently defend her Bellator girls’s featherweight championship in the first event of Bellator 249 on Thursday at Mohegan Solar Enviornment in Uncasville, Connecticut.
Cyborg battered her challenger in a one-sided spherical and a half of, bloodying Blencowe in the stand-up struggling with earlier than taking her to the canvas and locking in a rear-bare choke to catch the tapout at 2: 36 of Round 2.
“This is a dream intention beautiful,” stated Cyborg (23-2, 1 NC). “I’m in actuality completely happy, and angry for the next one.”
Cyborg, who had scored knockouts in 18 of her earlier 22 victories, modified into once making her first defense of the 145-pound championship she won from Julia Budd in January in her Bellator debut. That performed a sweep of all predominant featherweight titles in girls’s MMA, as Cyborg beforehand had reigned in the UFC, Invicta FC and the now-defunct Strikeforce.
A 35-year-frail native of Brazil who lives and trains in Southern California, Cyborg has suffered appropriate one defeat in 15 years, a TKO loss in 2018 to two-division UFC champion Amanda Nunes, who is No. 1 in the ESPN girls’s pound-for-pound rankings. Cyborg is ranked third.
Blencowe (13-8), a 37-year-frail from Australia, is a dilapidated two-time world champion in skilled boxing. Nonetheless her boxing never modified into once a element in this wrestle. Cyborg anxiousness her in the first spherical with leg kicks and expeditiously combinations of punches, and when the champ got the wrestle to the canvas appropriate two minutes in, she seized a dominant spot and simply about ended it then.
Blencowe survived to the bell, however she modified into once damaged items coming out for the 2nd spherical. Cyborg swarmed her, took her aid to the mat and completed her.
It modified into once Blencowe’s 2nd unsuccessful uncover for the Bellator girls’s featherweight title. She lost a shatter up intention to Budd in 2017.
Earlier in the evening, the wrestle card lost its co-main event when Patricky Freire modified into once pulled from his 159-pound catchweight bout with Jaleel Willis attributable to he fell sick. Mike Mazzulli, director of athletic regulations for the Mohegan Tribe, stated Freire modified into once eliminated from the cardboard “attributable to of an illness unrelated to COVID or weight reduce.”
Later, the fighter’s brother, Bellator men’s featherweight champ Patricio Freire, wrote on Instagram that he and Patricky’s trainers had called off the wrestle, asserting, “I caught him in his room a small bit dizzy exact when we had been going to recede to the enviornment.”
He stated his brother modified into once considered by two price medical doctors, had been medicated and modified into once feeling well “however devastated by the cancellation.”
