Add Ronald “Jacare” Souza to the list of middleweight contenders that is not at all happy about being sidelined in his bid for the title.
Michael “The Count” Bisping captured the UFC middleweight title in dramatic fashion when he knocked out Luke Rockhold at UFC 199 after accepting the bout on short notice. Rockhold was originally scheduled to meet former champion Chris Weidman that night, but Weidman was forced out of the fight with a neck injury. On two weeks notice, Bisping shocked the world and seized the title.
Bisping’s first title defense wasn’t against a top contender. He pushed for a rematch against Dan Henderson, who famously knocked him out at UFC 100 in 2009. The 46-year-old Henderson entered the bout coming off a win over Hector Lombard, but had lost six of his previous nine fights. Henderson didn’t earn the title bout, but it was a fight the public wanted to see. The rematch earned Fight of the Night honors at UFC 204.
UFC president Dana White announced that Yoel Romero would fight Bisping for the title next after Romero knocked out Weidman at UFC 205 in November.
“That’s the fight that makes sense. He beat Chris Weidman,” said White at the UFC 205 post-fight press conference at Madison Square Garden. “I don’t know when, but yeah, that’s the fight.”
Those plans changed with the March 1 announcement that former welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre was returning to the UFC for the first time since November 2013 to face Bisping for the middleweight title at a date later this year. Bisping’s second title defense not being against a the top contender in the weight class has the contenders up in arms. Romero called for the fight promotion to create an interim title.
On Thursday, third ranked Jacare voiced his outrage about the 185-pound division being held up and contenders bypassed for the second time. He hopes the upcoming Bisping and St-Pierre bout ends in a double knockout and called the matchmaking “crap.”
“I want them to suffer a double knockout,” Souza said during a scrum interview in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Thursday (transcribed by MMAFighting), perhaps inspired by this recent double knockout. “I want them to (expletive) themselves, man. That’s the reality. I don’t care about this fight. That’s the same thing I said when Bisping fought Dan Henderson. I didn’t care, too. I won’t even watch this crap.
“A lot of things have happened in the UFC,” he continued. “What upsets me is not the fact that St-Pierre is fighting Bisping. It’s normal to me, he can fight, but he never fought at 185; he always said he was too small. He was always scared of fighting Anderson [Silva], everybody knows that, and now he’s back and fighting at 185.
“Okay, nice, so fight me, I’m here. Come fight me, come earn this, and you won’t go through me, for sure, and then you fight Bisping. Fight Romero, and if you get past Romero you fight Bisping. No, he went straight to the belt, so that’s weird and bad for the middleweight division because no one’s happy with this (expletive). That’s the reality.”
