confirmed the bout<\/a> to RMC Sport.<\/p>\nSaint Denis (15-3), ranked No. 13 in the official UFC lightweight rankings, has won back-to-back fights, submitting Kyle Prepolec in May and Mauricio Ruffy in September. Those wins got Saint-Denis back on track after a two-fight losing skid that started with a surprising knockout loss to Dustin Poirier before a doctor’s stoppage loss to Renato Moicano.<\/p>\n
Prior to that skid, Saint Denis had won five consecutive fights in the Octagon, establishing himself as a potential future title challenger.<\/p>\n
No. 9-ranked Dariush (23-6-1) just snapped his own two-fight skid in his most recent outing, defeating Moicano by decision.<\/p>\n
Dariush had racked up an eight-fight winning streak between November 2018 and October 2022, seemingly positioning himself for a title shot. A June 2023 fight with Charles Oliveira could have gotten Dariush over the finish line and into a title fight, but Oliveira won by TKO in the first round. A 64-second knockout loss to Arman Tsarukyan followed before Dariush righted the ship with his win over Moicano.<\/p>\n
Saint Denis vs. Dariush joins a card headlined by a pair of title fights.<\/p>\n
In the main event, welterweight champion Jack Della Maddalena will make the first defense of his title against former lightweight champion Islam Makhachev, who vacated his 155-pound belt in search of gold in a new division. The co-main event features a similar clash as women’s flyweight champ Valentina Shevchenko defends her title against Weili Zhang, the two-time strawweight champion who is climbing a weight class to challenge the legendary Shevchenko.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Getty Images The UFC’s return to Madison Square Garden was already looking stacked, and the card has a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,638,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-175779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-mma","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n