Seems to me that he was doing pretty well against Nate and Marquez before he suffered pretty nasty cuts near the eye. Maybe panic is a pretty strong word, but does he change significantly or does his fighting prowess diminish once he gets cut?
Some fighters have a hard time with it, certainly didnt help...I also think he his style is to overwhelm and dominate, so when this doesnt happen he can fall apart perhaps because of a lack of versatility. I dont like to call it frontrunning but maybe it is..a lot of fighters are like that and for Juan it works extremely well most of the time.
That was what i though when i first saw the JMM fight. In between rounds after the cut, Diaz had a worried look on his face, he seemed a bit if not defeated, then deflated. Put it this way, when JMM is cut - he doesn't seem to care, but when Diaz is cut, it looks like it worries him. Having said that, I watched the fight again recently, and I think that though the cut didn't obviously help, it didn't dramatically change the way the fight was going. In those middle rounds, JMM had upped a gear and was all ready showing signs of moving ahead of Diaz before the cut happened. JMM was getting more and more accuracy and power into his shots, and though Diaz's work-rate was still quite high, he was starting to flail and a lot of his punches weren't landing. It looked like JMM had all ready begun to impose his will on Diaz. I don't know if I'm right to question Diaz's psycology, but to me it appeared Diaz was beaten mentally by JMM before he was beaten physically.
The same thing happened with Nate Campbell.......Campbell was imposing himself even before the cut, but after a loss, fighters conveniently use it as an excuse.
