Delight veteran Zuluzinho featured in the primary occasion of AMC Struggle Nights 114 final evening in Minsk, Belarus. The Brazilian heavyweight was taking over native favorite Petr Romankevich. And it appeared like Zuluzinho was about to attain an enormous win when one thing weird occurred.
The hefty Zuluzinho (who has slimmed down for the reason that early 2000s) had managed to entice Romankevich beneath him late in spherical one. From full mount, which Romankevich appeared to have zero probability of escaping, Zuluzinho patiently set-up an americana on his opponent’s left arm.
With Zuluzinho set to crank the arm, which absolutely would have compelled both a faucet or snap (after which a win), the referee broke up the motion and ordered each fighters to their toes. Zuluzinho appeared completely bemused by the scenario.
As quickly as they had been standing Romankevich clocked Zuluzinho with a headkick, punches and a knee to elicit a devastating face-plant KO.
Right here’s video of that sequence, shared by Showtime’s Shakiel Mahjouri, who branded the motion “completely disgusting”.
Completely disgusting. Referee stands up the fighter whereas he is locking up an Americana from mount. Fighter will get viciously knocked out moments later. Please fireplace that ref pic.twitter.com/TTiKuTaUx8
— Shakiel Mahjouri (@Shak_Fu) September 3, 2022
Condemnation of the sequence was widespread throughout social media final evening, with some calling foulplay and suggesting Zuluzinho was the sufferer of a repair.
It does appear that the promotion AMC Struggle Nights is accountable for this incident. Nevertheless, that’s as a result of they just lately modified their guidelines to permit this precise scenario to play out.
Twitter consumer AlreadyDemon shared a passage from a wmmaa.org article, posted in March, the place AMC Struggle Nights President Kamil Hajiyev defined how his group would now be penalizing floor fighters.
“To any extent further, in AMC Struggle Nights, from the second when the athletes had been on the bottom, the judges depend precisely one minute,” mentioned Hajiyev. “And after one minute, on the command of the timekeeper, the referee raises the athletes to the rack. It doesn’t matter what occurs at that second – a vivid ending transfer, a painful maintain, or one thing else. The minute ended, and the one who was in a dominant place didn’t use his probability, and the one who was not in it merely survived and used his probability to avoid wasting. Due to this fact, a minute – and the parterre is accomplished. I hope that the brand new guidelines will refresh Russian MMA.”
The scary KO loss moved Zuluzinho’s professional MMA report to 14-11 (1 NC). He got here to prominence in 2005 with appearances in Delight FC.
In Delight he famously misplaced to Fedor Emelianenko, Minotauro Nogueira and Butterbean (by americana).
Since then he’s fought largely in Brazil and Serbia. The loss to Romankevich was his second look at AMC Struggle Nights. His promotional debut was a call loss to Yusup Shuaev in February, a month earlier than the stand-up rule was instituted.
