Reign of the Dragon: Lyoto Machida's Domination of Rashad Evans at UFC 98

Hello, everybody, it’s your friendly neighborhood writer giving you my reflections regarding the Rashad Evans-Lyoto Machida fight on Saturday. As I said before UFC 98, my next articles will be about “Reign of the Dragon,” so here it goes...

May 23 was a date that many will remember for a long time. UFC 98 was the day when all the nonbelievers saw the light and started believing, because, my dear readers, action speaks for itself.

I don’t want to say I told you so, but Machida came, he saw, and he conquered. I have been saying all along that Machida is a precise killing machine; others were saying "Rashad is a good striker," "Rashad is a good wrestler," "Rashad is explosive." Well, guess what? It wouldn’t matter if Evans had four hands because he wasn’t even able to touch Machida for almost 10 minutes.

This was one of the most exiting matches that I have ever seen. Machida showed everybody who’s the best 205-pound fighter in the world and also one of the top pound-for-pound fighters in the world.

The fight

As I have written on my previous article, Evans vs. Machida UFC 98: Fight Prediction, I will give some comments regarding my prediction.

“I think Machida will control the pace of the fight as he has been doing in all his UFC fights.”

That’s just what he did.

“In a fight Evans always starts very cautiously, as seen in the Ortiz, Liddell and Griffin fights. Rashad likes to measure his opponent than attack, as he demonstrated with Chuck and Griffin.”

As seen in UFC 98 Rashad didn’t even attack.

“Machida is no Chuck, Tito or Forrest. Lyoto is a very skilled technical fighter and very elusive and when he senses a weakness he will capitalize.”

He did capitalize and knocked out Rashad.

“In the end I think Machida’s fighting style and elusiveness will be too much for Evans.

The dragon will win the fight by knock out in the fourth round after dominating the three first rounds.”

I really thought Machida will knock him out in the fourth round, but, to my surprise, Machida was even more aggressive than I thought he would be. So I stand corrected about my statement regarding the knockout round. Nevertheless, I was positively surprised, and now we have a new light heavyweight champion.

Much respect to Mike for his “apology” article about Machida; he is a man of his word. As for the other writers who talked about “redeeming articles,” we'll just wait and see if they redeem themselves.

A big thanks goes to all my fans and readers, considering that my “Evans vs. Machida UFC 98: Fight Prediction” article is the second most read MMA article this month.

I’m occupied right now, but very soon I will write an article about the “The reign of the Dragon and potential threats.” It will be interesting; I did touch the subject in one of my previous articles, but this will be more in-depth.

I will finish by saying is nice to see more and more people are starting to appreciate Machida’s skills.