The primary Final Combating Championship present of the brand new
yr has taken an enormous hit.
In line with reporter Igor Lazorin on
Thursday morning, Geoff Neal
(15-4) has suffered an damage and has been compelled out of his
pairing with Shavkat
Rakhmonov (16-0) at
UFC Battle Evening 217. The 2 welterweights have been set to toe the
line within the co-headliner of the UFC Vegas-based occasion on Jan. 14.
Per Lazorin, the promotion is seeking to discover a new opponent for
the top-10 170-pounder Rakhmonov. Neal, nonetheless, confirmed this
information, whereas stating that he seeks maintaining the combat collectively and
pushing it to a later date.
“Fights [sic] off individuals…seeking to rebook Shavkat later. No one’s
scared,” Neal wrote on
Fb shortly after the information broke.
Neal was aiming to carry a two-fight win streak to a few straight,
as he had beforehand topped Santiago
Ponzinibbio on the finish of 2021 and got here again in mid-2022 to
knock Vicente
Luque out. “Handz of Metal” was intent on derailing the hype
practice and unbeaten report of his opponent, having mentioned in a latest
interview with
MMA Junkie that he would “take the win…simple.” Making his
promotional debut in 2018 after claiming a contract on the primary
season of Dana White’s Contender Collection, Neal has scored
5 stoppages throughout his seven wins, notably placing away Luque as
nicely as Niko Worth
and Mike
Perry on his approach up.
Kazakhstan’s Rakhmonov has but to style defeat as an expert,
ratting off 12 wins in his first years within the sport earlier than becoming a member of
the UFC in 2020. Since then, “Nomad” has saved his dominant methods
intact, stopping Alex
Oliveira, Michel
Prazeres, Carlston
Harris and Neil Magny
one after the opposite as he surged into contendership. Rakhmonov has
solely been to the third spherical one time as a professional, and he celebrates
an equal variety of knockouts to submissions on his ledger.
UFC Battle Evening 217 will keep on on the UFC Apex in Las Vegas, in
a card capped off by a middleweight throwdown between Nassourdine
Imavov and Kelvin
Gastelum. If the promotion can not discover a new opponent to face
Rakhmonov, the brand new co-headliner will possible come within the type of a
middleweight conflict between Punahele
Soriano and Roman
Kopylov. Extra important card tilts embody Dan Ige vs.
Damon
Jackson at featherweight, flyweights Jimmy Flick
and Charles
Johnson battling it out and Ketlen
Vieira taking over Raquel
Pennington within the girls’s 135-pound class.
