Belfort-Santiago Among Additional Bouts Announced for Affliction: Trilogy
On Thursday, Affliction officially announced the majority of the lineup for its August 1 Affliction: Trilogy event, which will take place at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California and air live on pay-per-view and HDNet.
Trilogy is headlined by a heavyweight matchup between top-ranked Fedor Emelianenko and Josh Barnett.
Also confirmed for the pay-per-view main card are Gegard Mousasi vs. Renato Sobral, Vitor Belfort vs. Jorge Santiago, and Paul Daley vs. Jay Hieron, as well as Paul Buentello, who is expected to take on the winner of a June 27 bout between Pedro Rizzo and Gilbert Yvel.
The fight card for Trilogy currently features:
PAY-PER-VIEW CARD
- Fedor Emelianenko (c) vs. Josh Barnett
WAMMA Heavyweight Championship - Gegard Mousasi vs. Renato “Babalu” Sobral
- Vitor Belfort vs. Jorge Santiago
- Paul Buentello vs. Gilbert Yvel-Pedro Rizzo winner*
- Paul Daley vs. Jay Hieron
HDNET CARD
- Chris Horodecki vs. Dan Lauzon
- Ben Rothwell vs. Chase Gormley
- Deividas Taurosevicius vs. TBA
- Brett Cooper vs. Akbarh Arreola*
- Mark Hominick vs. TBA*
PRELIMINARY CARD
- Lucio Linhares vs. Mikhail Zayats
- Rob Broughton vs. Jessie Gibbs
* Not officially announced
Tags: Akbarh Arreola, Ben Rothwell, Brett Cooper, Chase Gormley, Chris Horodecki, Dan Lauzon, Deividas Taurosevicius, Fedor Emelianenko, Gegard Mousasi, Gilbert Yvel, Jay Hieron, Jessie Gibbs, Josh Barnett, Lucio Linhares, Mark Hominick, Mikhail Zayats, Paul Daley, Pedro Rizzo, Renato Sobral, Rob Broughton, Vitor Belfort
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Gotta watch this card…….
Man another Affliction card. It’s going to make me bu–Zzzzzzz…..
sleepy time for DbiZ? well atleast get drunk so we can medically suspend your liver again for 60days
I have an at-large question for the collective:
Does anyone think that there is a SERIOUS non-UFC challenger to Fedor if and probably when he defeats Josh Barnett?
I’m a Barnett fan, and would love to see him put on a grueling catch-wrestling clinic and leave Fedor a smear on the mat, but like most everyone else I just don’t see that happening. So once Fedor beats Barnett, who does he fight outside the UFC? CroCop again? More UFC cast-offs? Some angry sumo or other super-mutant attraction from the Japanese promotional ranks?
Maybe I’m short-sighted, but I just don’t see a whole Hell of a lot of legitimate options for Fedor after Barnett…
Jeff Monson has been asking for a shot at Fedor, ofcourse there is always Alistair Overeem (which I believe that StrikeForce is going to absorb Affliction anyways sooo we won’t get into that yet).. But to be honest the UFC is where it is at, hell I would put him in against Carwin right off the bat, why you ask well I say whynot.. If he beats Carwin (which we all expect him to do) then hey you got a shot at the title 2 out of 3 contracted fights done.. Its actually quite simple once you sit down and think about it, and in all honesty I do believe that if Fedor didn’t lose til he “retired” Dana would let him “retire” the champion…
But in all honestly he is going back to Japan (DREAM) and will fight 5 or 6 more times make Vladi a butt load of money and “retire”… This is will be his 3rd fight for Affliction and well I don’t see either of them continuing this realationship… Perhaps once more we shall see… Yet I believe that he is going to Japan not the UFC..
Can you with a nonbiased opinion honestly say there is a ufc challenger?
Brock? to inexperienced right now
Cain? we saw in the Kongo fight that he’s not as well rounded as advertised.
Carwin? also untested, although he got back to his feet he looked very uncomfortable and nervous on his back with Gonzaga
Nog? Already been beat twice by Fedor
Mir? I think he might have the best chance in the UFC and that’s slim.
I love watching the UFC as much as most but I also recognize that MMA doesn’t revolve around the UFC. It wasn’t all that long ago Pride was the top dog in MMA, you didn’t hear people talking down about UFC fighters saying stuff like “when are they gonna go to pride and face real competition?” I’m not trying to “troll” or argue, I’m just saying it’s getting pretty old with people belittling a fighter for not drinking dana’s koolaide LOL.
Mir has a slim chance? He did something that Fedor never could. He stopped Big Nog. To say that is a SLIM chance shows that your using russian pubes as a bungie cord.
Furthermore, we don’t belittle Fedor for not drinking the Kool-Aid, we belittle him for trying to assume the title of best in the world when he won’t fight to prove it. He’d rather fight 7 foot kickboxers under MMA rules than take real fights. It’s his prerogative, sure, but it doesn’t do much for claims of greatness.
I’m not trying to firebomb here, and will always give the Red Devil his due, but if we’re going to start considering “challengers”, I’ll put it out there that I [and a lot of others] got the impression that Fedor wasn’t all that into fighting Randy Couture when he re-captured the HW title and started calling him out. Maybe Fedor didn’t like the style match-up, maybe he didn’t like the idea of fighting “Captian America” with thousands chanting “USA! USA!” for the entire length of the fight, or maybe he’s not all that thrilled with fighting in a cage and/or fighting in the US since the PRIDE/UFC merger. I’m not trying to say Fedor ducked Couture, and I know Couture’s own promotional issues didn’t help matters, but if Fedor REALLY wanted to be recognized as the best HW MMA fighter on the planet, he would have signed on the dotted UFC line regardless of the noise from his camp and gotten into the cage with Couture, who would have been considered the underdog.
However if the argument is made that Fedor is doing what he’s doing for financial reasons, and there is nothing wrong with that, then I can’t imagine that Dana White and the UFC wouldn’t have cut him a large enough check to face The Natural for an ACTUAL HW championship from an ACUTAL MMA promotion, and not that Afflict-ed WAMMA-lamma ding dong thing he’s sporting nowadays and asking people to buy as the HW MMA world championship…
jcohl,
A couple things:
The Affliction events are held in the US. And Dana says that he’s never dealt directly with Fedor. Allegedly Fedor’s managers have made some outrageous demands, which lead to the Russian stadium April Fools joke posted by the UFC.
Belfort is going to knock Santiago out hard.
I like this card but I dont know where Affliction will go from here,
they need more big name eg TITO ORTIZ
They need more good fighters, e.g. NOT Tito.
lawl dbiz
Seriously tho.. fedor is like watching Asilva, Machida, or GStPierre the guy is clearly on another level levelling mofos if you don’t see that then you don’t know much about MMA. Argue all you want but the truth is the truth..
Before Affliction rolled around, it had been 4 years since Fedor had a real fight. 2 wins does not the greatest ever make. Now that his 2 wins recently are against Timmeh and a glass-jawed Arlovski….
Yeah. Still doesn’t make him the greatest.
Hey, I could be the best boxer at the Special Olympics, but it doesn’t make me Ali.
Plus Brett Rogers handled Arlovksi better than Fedor did… I’m just saying…
fairly recently ,
tito did way better against machida
than evans the previous champ.
plus his list of wins is jaw dropping.
tough fights all of them.
so the comment above is kinda disrespectful to his fight ing ability