{"id":185548,"date":"2025-10-02T17:31:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T17:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/185548\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T17:31:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T17:31:07","slug":"alex-pereira-explains-why-tom-aspinalls-criticism-makes-no-sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/185548\/","title":{"rendered":"Alex Pereira explains why Tom Aspinall\u2019s criticism \u2018makes no sense\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Aspinall recently told TNT Sports<\/a> that Alex Pereira was given matchups that \u201cwere quite favorable\u201d until he had to defend his belt against Magomed Ankalaev earlier this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cPoatan\u201d doesn\u2019t agree with the UFC heavyweight champion\u2019s assessment.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust with the threats of the takedown,\u201d Aspinall said, \u201cEven in the first fight we didn\u2019t really see Ankalaev really go for the takedowns too much, but I think just the threat being there, stylistically he\u2019s a bad matchup for Pereira.\u201d<\/p>\n

A former GLORY kickboxing two-division champion, Pereira moved to Danbury, Conn., in 2020 to help Glover Teixeira prepare for an upcoming fight with Thiago Santos. In return, Teixeira helped him work on his grappling and wrestling skills to later transition to mixed martial arts.<\/p>\n

Pereira won an LFA fight later that year\u2014his first MMA contest in over four years\u2014with a scary knockout of Thomas Powell that ultimately led to a deal with the UFC after he parted ways with GLORY.<\/p>\n

From there, Pereira had an incredibly fast rise, challenging and dethroning Israel Adesanya at middleweight after beating Andreas Michailidis, Bruno Silva, and Sean Strickland. Pereira lost an immediate rematch with Adesanya by knockout.<\/p>\n

At light heavyweight, \u201cPoatan\u201d won a split decision over Jan Blachowicz before claiming and defending the title with vicious knockouts of Jiri Prochazka (twice), Jamahal Hill, and Khalil Rountree before dropping a decision to Ankalaev earlier this year.<\/p>\n

In his response to Aspinall, the UFC star argues that being a pure kickboxer with less than two years of experience training for a full-time return to MMA automatically made any athlete on the company roster a complicated matchup for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re talking about the biggest organization in the world,\u201d Pereira said during the UFC 320 media day on Wednesday. \u201cI\u2019m a guy who comes from kickboxing, I had no grappling experience, little experience in MMA. We\u2019re talking about the highest level of the sport, so if you were to put the worst guy in the UFC against me, I\u2019d be at disadvantage, so that makes no sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pereira and Ankalaev went the distance in March and the Russian talent failed in every single one of his 12 takedown attempts, but outstruck the kickboxing specialist on the feet to win the 205-pound title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tom Aspinall recently told TNT Sports that Alex Pereira was given matchups that \u201cwere quite favorable\u201d until he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":{"0":"post-185548","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-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185548","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=185548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}