This week was the beginning of the semi-finals and started with the coaches meeting with Dana about the fights. Both guys didn’t see a need to meet with the fighters since they could agree on all the fights, but Dana wanted to anyway. All the discussions went fine and then Cameron Dollar said he wanted to fight his teammate, Jason Dent.
This gives Dana the idea that they should have teammate vs. teammate to ensure the finale is guaranteed US vs UK. The coaches disagree completely, Bisping says “they” are worried about not having a guy in finale, which causes Hendo to laugh and say he must mean Dana when he says “they”. Dana tells them not to say anything to their guys.
Dana announces the fight and decided to leave it with US vs UK, to Dan Henderson’s obvious surprise. The semi-finals are Damarques vs Nick, Cameron vs Andre, Ross vs Dent and Wilks vs Lester.
At the house both teams celebrate being tied 4 -4 and starting the semis by having an intercontinental barbeque. During this we see Pierce talking to Faulkner about how great the UK guys are and how much he dislikes his team, which Richie hears and confronts him about. Richie questions if Pierce actually tried to get Dana to let him fight. Pierce tells him to come up in weight and they can settle it. So maybe we will see them in the undercard of the finale.
An interesting thing that came out of that confrontation was Pierce saying that the US guys were acting like animals drinking and breaking things all the time. So either Pierce is exaggerating or the UFC made a conscious decision to edit out the house shenanigans due to the last few seasons, which actually caused some concern with the Nevada State Athletic Commission for this season.
Pierce is shown telling more training tactics of Team US to Team UK, and then we cut to the next morning where Richie lets the team know. This leads to Hendo questioning Pierce in the gym and Pierce adamantly denying it. The funny thing is that Dan says to the camera that if he is lying everyone will see that when it airs, and we did.
Damarques is shown grappling and he states that he came with good hands and good ground skills, but due to the time on the show he now has a good clinch and good ground and pound. Which makes complete sense after working with Dan Henderson.
Nick explains that he thinks Damarques is just average and that he (Nick) will have the mental edge.
Great pre-fight editing this week as we intercut between Damarques warming up with strikes as well as praying in the octagon.
Damarques won the fight via unanimous decision based on his control of Nick on the ground and hist superior striking. But the fight was rather close the entire time and Nick almost won it in the first round when he rocked Damarques. This lead to a great 20 seconds of Nick and Damarques just swinging wildly like Rocky vs Apollo. If Damarques is going to win in the finale, he will need to do much more damage than he did in this fight.
That is all for this week, be sure to follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/RaysMMAThoughts for regular updates about the world of MMA, like this week’s news that Kimbo (yes that Kimbo) will be a contestant on the next season of The Ultimate Fighter.