Machado Garry has fought off competition from second-ranked Carlos Prates and third-ranked Michael Morales to secure the title shot.<\/p>\n
Brazil’s Prates has knocked out his last three opponents, although lost to Machado Garry in April last year, while Ecuador’s Morales has won all 19 of his fights.<\/p>\n
In 2024, Machado Garry lost a number one contender bout against Shavkat Rakhmonov but the Kazakh fighter has not fought since after struggling with injury.<\/p>\n
In February, he was removed from the UFC’s welterweight rankings, which promoted Machado Garry.<\/p>\n
The last fighter from Ireland to compete for a belt in a major MMA promotion was Karl Moore when he lost a Bellator light-heavyweight title fight against Corey Anderson in 2024.<\/p>\n
In the co-main event in Philadelphia, American-Brazilian Mackenzie Dern will make the first defence of her strawweight title against Canada’s Gillian Robertson. <\/p>\n
Dern, 33, beat Virna Jandiroba for the belt in October for her third straight victory, while 31-year-old Robertson comes into the bout on a five-fight win streak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Machado Garry has fought off competition from second-ranked Carlos Prates and third-ranked Michael Morales to secure the title…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":744279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85],"class_list":["post-744278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744278","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=744278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/744279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}