Fans who were excited to tune in for a huge fight between two legends were left baffled on this day in 2018.
As seen in recent times with Zhang Weili vacating her strawweight title in order to face Valentina Shevchenko at flyweight, the UFC is no longer keen on fighters holding two belts at the same time.
There have been a number of other examples just this year, with the likes of Ilia Topuria and Islam Makhachev also giving up their belts in order to move up.
This allows divisions to stay more active, but it also denies the opportunity to put together some massive champion vs champion clashes.
Before the Bellator brand was slowly phased out by the PFL, the promotion put together a super fight between two of the roster’s best fighters, but not everything went to plan.
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UK fans didn’t get to watch Rory MacDonald challenge Gegard Mousasi due to ‘Peppa Pig’ cutting off the live broadcast
On this day in 2018, Bellator hosted one of their biggest events at the SAP Center in California.
After Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson stopped Wanderlei Silva in their fourth meeting, two champions collided for the first time.
Rory MacDonald’s UFC career didn’t go exactly to plan, but after leaving the promotion in 2016, he went on to be one of the top fighters in Bellator, where he reigned as the welterweight champion.
Another former UFC fighter, Gegard Mousasi, achieved similar success, leaving the Octagon as one of the top fighters in his weight class before dominating in Bellator.
At Bellator 206, MacDonald moved up to middleweight to challenge Mousasi, but unfortunately for some fans, they weren’t able to watch it due to an unfortunate error.
MMA journalist Sean Sheehan called the event “some sort of sick joke” after viewers in the UK had their coverage suddenly cut off before the main event got underway.
Due to the event still being live at 6am in the UK, the TV channel switched to children’s cartoon ‘Peppa Pig’ because live mixed martial arts was not suitable to show on that particular channel at that time.
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Bellator 206 ended up being a night for Rory MacDonald to forget
While some super fights end up producing instant classics, the main event of Bellator 206 was a one-sided domination.
Rory MacDonald, when speaking on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show, stated that it was “the worst performance of his career” after he was stopped by Gegard Mousasi in the second round.
There were a lot of questions about whether ‘The Red King’ would continue fighting after he openly admitted in the interview that he knew he was going to lose on September 29.
“During the fight I felt frozen. I felt like everything was underwater,” MacDonald said. “All my footwork, all my punching … I couldn’t gauge anything. Everything in my mind was slow. There was no fire, no passion to make me want to fight hard. I pretty much knew it was finished.”
MacDonald returned to the cage the following year, but it still seemed like he was battling some issues in his majority draw with Jon Fitch.