‘I Don’t Think It’s Fair’

Excuses, excuses.

Unfortunately, top Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Welterweight contender Jack Della Maddalena is not competing in his home country of Australia this weekend for UFC 312; however, he will headline his first UFC event next month (Sat., March 22, 2025) when he takes on Leon Edwards at UFC London.

Edwards lost his UFC Welterweight championship at UFC 304 when he was outworked by Belal Muhammad. In the months since he lost his title, “Rocky” has admitted that fighting at 5 a.m. really affected him.

“Fighting at 5 o’clock in the morning, I feel like that affected my performance. I didn’t feel myself,” Edwards said recently. “The sleep thing, the late hours, that made a big difference to me in that fight.”

Today (Fri., Feb. 7, 2025), Maddalena pushed back against Edwards.

“In my opinion, I feel like Leon has always sort of fought like that. So I think to blame the time, I don’t think it’s fair on Belal’s part,” Maddalena told The Mac Life. “I think Leon has shown that he’s happy to sort of not do too much, just use his precise striking, and just sit back.”

“I think Belal pulled off the perfect gameplan,” Maddalena added. “Just push the pace, grab ahold of him, and make it a bit more ugly, so, yeah, I just think it was more that was the style of the fight.”

There is no doubt that fist fighting at the crack of dawn, when people are waking up to get coffee before going to work, will affect a professional athlete. It’s a perfectly fair complaint, but JDM makes good points about Edwards’s style—which ultimately lost him the fight.

Also, props to Maddalena for giving credit to “Remember the Name.”

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This news first appeared on MMA Mania. Read the original article.