{"id":126236,"date":"2025-09-07T20:20:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T20:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/126236\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T20:20:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T20:20:08","slug":"strickland-buries-buddy-borralho-over-ufc-319-backup-hes-an-idiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/126236\/","title":{"rendered":"Strickland buries \u2018buddy\u2019 Borralho over UFC 319 backup: \u2018He\u2019s an idiot\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a tough night <\/a>for Brazil\u2019s Fighting Nerds and no one had it tougher than Caio Borralho, who lost an opportunity<\/a> to fight for the middleweight title after getting stuck on the end of Nassourdine Imavov\u2019s crisp counter-striking for five rounds.<\/p>\n

Imavov just looked more prepared to take a calculated and methodical decision in front of his home crowd. Perhaps that had to do with Borralho\u2019s training camp being interrupted by an extra weight cut to play backup for Chimaev vs. du Plessis at UFC 319. Occasional training partner Sean Strickland certainly seemed to think so.<\/p>\n

\u201cCaio is my buddy but he\u2019s an idiot,\u201d Strickland wrote on X (formerly Twitter). \u201cHe trained with us and was useless. Me: \u2018What\u2019s wrong with you?\u2019 Caio: \u2018I\u2019m cutting, I\u2019m an alternate.\u2019 So you\u2019re giving up 4 weeks of your camp cutting weight twice while having a fight coming up? Whoever told you to do that, please hit him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interestingly enough, Imavov\u2019s team claims they were the one who tricked Borralho<\/a> into taking the backup role.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf he comes to the cage and he\u2019s not in top form, that\u2019s his problem I\u2019m not going to have pity,\u201d Imavov told Full Send MMA leading up to the fight. \u201cAnd there you go. On our part, yes of course, it was the fact we didn\u2019t go to do the back-up. We know very well that it\u2019s annoying.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst we were supposed to be the backup,\u201d Imavov\u2019s manager Yunes Ben said. \u201cAnd when we said we don\u2019t want to do it any more, we did it on purpose and we knew that his ego would take the fight and it would be a bad thing for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s some smart maneuvering from Imavov and his team, but it\u2019s easy to say all this after UFC 319 goes through without a hitch. Given the number of times<\/a> Khamzat Chimaev has flamed out of fights,<\/a> Borralho had a better chance than most backups to get catapulted into a title fight.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a lesson here for future fighters to learn: maybe don\u2019t mess up your training camp for a title fight eliminator so you can play backup a few weeks earlier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a tough night for Brazil\u2019s Fighting Nerds and no one had it tougher than Caio Borralho,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85,1396],"class_list":{"0":"post-126236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-mma","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}