Shauna Bannon (5-1) took on Bruna Brasil (9-3-1) in the prelims of the UFC Fight Night London. The strawweight fight was the second contest of the night and Brasil won the bout via unanimous decision. However, it looks like the result has not pleased the controversial UFC superstar, Conor McGregor.
During the contest, McGregor was quite active on Twitter as he expressed that Shauna Bannon should have won the contest. While he has deleted the tweets since then, Conor was not quite happy with how the judges saw the fight. In one of the deleted tweets, he expressed that the fight was 1-1 heading into the final round of the contest. By the time the final round ended, Conor was confident about Bannon’s chances.
He added that Shauna was the clear winner as he wrote, “2-1 handy.” However, Once the judges declared their decision, McGregor deleted his tweets. The judges scored the contest 30-27, 29-28, and 29-28 at the end of the scheduled three rounds. It just extends McGregor’s recent misfortunes with the fighting game. His team is down 7-1 in the ongoing TUF 31.
Was Conor McGregor right to pick Shauna Bannon over Bruna Brasil at UFC London?
According to UFC Stats, Shauna Bannon was clearly the much better fighter on the feet. She reportedly landed 124 strikes in total with 54 of them being significant strikes. In total, Bannon attempted 223 strikes as opposed to Bruna Brasil’s 111. Brasil’s total strikes added up to 73 and 56 of them were significant. While Brasil landed nearly half the strikes that Bannon did, she did have two more significant strikes.
But on the ground, Bruna had 3:21 minutes of control, whereas Bannon only had 1:05 minutes of control time. Although neither had any submission attempts, Bruna did land 2 takedowns as opposed to 0 that the Conor McGregor-endorsed fighter landed. With 66% takedown accuracy and 62% significant strikes landed, one can assume why the judges favored Bruna Brasil inside the O2 Arena.
In complete control from the very beginning đź‘Š@BrunaBrasilMMA gets the UD victory!
— UFC (@ufc) July 22, 2023
[ #UFCLondon | Live on @ESPNPlus đź“ş ] pic.twitter.com/Jyc7w63HTB
As far as Conor McGregor is concerned, he was rooting for Bannon as she is sponsored by the Irish fighter as per talkSPORT. On top of that, Bannon also hails from Ireland and it was her very first loss in her relatively young MMA career. Hence, McGregor’s emotions perhaps got the better of him. But did you agree with Conor’s assessment of the bout? Let us know in the comments down below.