told MMA Junkie that his middleweight appearance would be a one-off<\/a> and that he planned on going back down to welterweight. However, Page (23-3 MMA, 2-1 UFC) finds himself booked against former 185-pound title challenger Jared Cannonier (18-8 MMA, 11-8 UFC) at UFC 319 on Aug. 16 from United Center in Chicago.<\/p>\nAdvertisement<\/p>\n
So how did he end up here?<\/p>\n
“It is what it is. It’s kind of worked out how it’s worked out,” Page told MMA Junkie. “I would have preferred to get a fight in the welterweight division. As I’ve said before, it feels like there’s a lot more politics going on in the welterweight division, and everyone’s a bit more tentative about who they fight. I’m just not at that stage of my career to care enough.<\/p>\n
“I’m just like, ‘Give me a good fight, and I’m in.’ I expected after that last win I was going to get another good fight, and I was getting names that didn’t really make any sense. So, middleweight it is. I’m happy to get such a high-level fighter, probably the highest-ranked fighter that I’ve had so far. So I’m excited. I’m happy with the fights that I’ve had.”<\/p>\n
Page still hopes to get a U.K. vs. U.K. showdown against former UFC welterweight champion Leon Edwards some day but doesn’t see the current landscape at 170 pounds getting any less tangled.<\/p>\n
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“Now having confirmed that Islam (Makhachev) is coming up to welterweight to fight Jack Della (Maddalena), again, it feels like welterweight is just going to be a bit of a holdup,” Page said. “Middleweight right now definitely seems way more exciting. Obviously I got Jared to focus on at the moment, but I may be staying here for a while until things start moving again at welterweight.”<\/p>\n
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: UFC 319: Why Michael Page prefers middleweight over welterweight<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael Page has a sound reason for remaining in the UFC middleweight division. Prior to handing Shara Magomedov…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,34332,25037,638,1302,19962,82,640,10092],"class_list":["post-50245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fighting","tag-jared-cannonier","tag-michael-page","tag-mma","tag-mma-junkie","tag-shara-magomedov","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-welterweight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50245","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=50245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}