Just watched PRIDE 33 for the first time......

Commentary on PRIDE 33 is on post #63. :smoke









1) Fedor - Cro Cop was a good fight. Bit disappointed with how one-sided it was though. Little underwhelmed by Cro Cop's performance. His cardio didn't seem that great.

2) Commentary team is slightly better than the UFC. Bas is good, the other guy is alright if a little bland. Neither of them provided as much in-depth analysis of the action as Rogan does. The main PRIDE guy is definately better than Goldie though.

3) Tournament formats where guys fight twice in one night can **** off. :bart

4) Jon Jones beats Prime Shogun more times than not.

5) More lay and pray than PRIDE's reputation would suggest. Much more.

6) The card was a good, enjoyable event all in all.

7) Funny Japanese-style casual racism in the pre-fight hype - "Russia is known as a cold, dark place where things are simple." :rofl

:hat

 

:huh

1) I said that Fedor-Cro Cop was good. I'm not going to call it one of the best fights I've ever seen, because it was pretty one-sided and Cro Cop either gassed out or went into a shell for fairly large parts of it. Still, it was a good scrap.

2) Personally I'm not a fan of one-night tournaments, because I don't like that one semi-finalist can have a hard-fought decision win, the other gets a 20 second KO, and they have to fight each other an hour later. It's not a level playing field. I can appreciate that some people enjoy the excitement of it, but personally I'd rather have the final held when both fighters can come in fully rested and prepared, with fight plans devised for an opponent known weeks in advance. :good

3) Though I have watched PRIDE fights before, this was my first full event that I've sat down and watched. And since I've seen so many complaints about "UFC lay and pray" and lots of comments about how exciting PRIDE fights were by comparison with their ref standups and yellow cards and such, it surprised me the amount of lay and pray that went on.

4) I said that the card was a good, enjoyable event. Which it was. I just didn't find it to be "OMG this is the greatest thing ever in sports" type good. But I would certainly have considered the PPV to be money well spent. How much enthusiasm do you want me to display, exactly? :huh What do you want me to do, get a Final Conflict tattoo? :yep

:hat

 

I think it's a pretty even blend of positive and negative comments. The positive comments are bigger than the negative ones too - eg "Fedor-Cro Cop was a good fight" versus "Cro-Cop's cardio didn't seem that great." Or "PRIDE main commentator is a little bland" versus "Commentary team is slightly better than the UFC." :good

But then, shouldn't I have a blend of positive and negative comments anyway? Would I be a better commentator if I went 100% negative or 100% positive? :blood :good

Obviously on here there are two main camps. "PRIDE was the Golden Era of MMA", versus "Zuffa-era UFC is the golden age."

I'm always hearing about how much better the PRIDE cards were. How much more action-packed and exciting the fights were. How the cards were stacked with great matchups. How all the fighters were 10x better than the guys with the same names who showed up in the UFC six months later. :yep

And I know that Final Conflict 2005 is rated as one of the best events, so I watched it.

I was looking forward to seeing Vovchanchyn, because I've only ever seen clips of him and I know his reputation as a striker. But pretty much his entire fight was spent on the ground. :conf

And the same with Tank Abbott. I wanted and expected to see an old Tank get KOed in a standup brawl. Instead the entire fight took place on the ground with nothing much happening. :conf

I'm not talking **** on the card. It was good. How much can you really ***** about a card with Fedor, Cro Cop, Wanderlei, Overeem, Vovchanchyn AND Shogun? I enjoyed it and I would have felt the PPV money was well spent. Is that not enough enthusiasm? :huh

It's just that the format doesn't appeal to me so much. I prefer a cage to a ring, as I dislike interrupting the action to relocate the fighters to the centre of the ring. Also I don't like seeing fighters get tangled up in the ropes and attacked with kicks and stomps. And I can appreciate that tournaments are exciting, but to me it smacks of a pro-wrestling gimmick rather than a legitimate sporting event. I like an important fight to have both fighters well-rested and prepared. Honestly, I don't consider any of this as fanboyish hating. :good

:hat

 

:good

The bolded is exactly how I feel. :yep

Personally, I like everyone fighting in one organization, so long as all the top guys fight each other. Which, by and large, they do.

And for me, PRIDE is too much of an event thing, rather than a legit sport. Different strokes for different folks. :conf I can certainly appreciate a lot of the fights and the staging in PRIDE, but I don't see it as the greatest thing ever in MMA. It has its pro points, but I can't just overlook the flaws. :good

And I don't understand how the quality of the fighters was apparently so much higher. :conf Seems to me that the very best PRIDE guys would be top level in the modern UFC, and the likes of Jones and JDS would have been kicking everyone's ass in PRIDE as well. :conf

:hat

 

Yeah, it was a good fight. I'm not hating. :good

But I don't see Cro-Cop just walking through the likes of JDS or Cain. The way the PRIDE heavyweight holy trinity is talked about, it's like nobody in an octagon can ever compete with them. Put today's JDS in against Fedor on that Final Conflict card, and that's a fight for the ages as well. Same thing if you throw in Bones against Final Conflict Wandy. :good

:hat

 

Oh, there's no argument there.

Well, objectively speaking there's no reason why Junior vs Cain wasn't on the same level.

And Silva-Sonnen will be electric. Sure it's not the two best heavyweights in the world fighting for the title. But it is the UFC's #1 ATG, and a lot of MMA fans are very heavily invested in the result of the fight. Sonnen by UD would cause an uproar in the MMA world, and would be a huge fight in the sport's history.

I don't think so. A ring seems a natural environment for a boxing or kickboxing match, not so for fights with takedowns and grappling involved.

Maybe. He'd probably fight wearing tights and a cape.

:hat