Makhachev was greeted by loud cheers as he made his walkout and made a statement in the first round as he took Machado Garry down at the first attempt.<\/p>\n
The Irishman defended on the ground admirably, but it was a sign of things to come as Makhachev controlled the rest of the round with the challenger trapped against the side of the cage.<\/p>\n
Makhachev’s dominance continued into the second round as he knocked Machado Garry down with a head kick, before slamming the dazzled Irishman to the canvas.<\/p>\n
Again Machado Garry survived until the end of the round and although he found some success with a number of kicks midway through the fight, Makhachev continued to assert control when the pair grappled.<\/p>\n
Machado Garry bloodied Makhachev’s face with some punches in the clinch, but the Russian shrugged it off to reach the final bell ahead in a number of key stats.<\/p>\n
He secured seven unanswered takedowns and clocked over 12 minutes of control time to Machado Garry’s 34 seconds.<\/p>\n
Although the Irishman landed 29 significant strikes to Makhachev’s 22, it was not enough to convince the judges of the win.<\/p>\n
In a show of respect, the pair embraced before Machado Garry raised Makhachev’s arm in victory.<\/p>\n
“To all my fans, Ireland, everybody, I’m sorry I couldn’t get this done,” said Machado Garry. <\/p>\n
“But I stand here as a man proud of what I’ve done, proud of where I came from and proud where this will take me. To all the fans who doubt me, I’ll be back.”<\/p>\n
At 28, Machado Garry has plenty of time to realise his dream of becoming a UFC champion, while Makhachev’s victory adds weight to claims he’s closing in on being regarded as the greatest UFC fighter of all time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Makhachev was greeted by loud cheers as he made his walkout and made a statement in the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":570642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-570641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}