Aljamain Sterling believes Sean O’Malley is the real deal and doesn’t put too much stock in his loss to Marlon Vera.
At UFC 252 in August, Vera scored a first-round TKO win over O’Malley due to O’Malley’s ankle giving out. After Vera kicked him, it hit the nerve and caused “Suga” to have drop foot and roll it a bunch until he stayed on the ground and Vera landed some ground and pound and the fight was over.
Since the fight, both men have taken shots at one another. But, at UFC 260, O’Malley reminded everyone just how good he is as he scored a dominant third-round KO over Thomas Almeida. For Sterling, he shows that “Chito’s” win was bit flukish.
“I think people kind of wrote him off a little bit too soon,” Sterling said to Middle Easy. “The Chito fight was a very flukish scenario, not saying it was a fluke kick because he threw the kick, but it was just one of those things, like, what are the odds that that actually happened to his foot?
“The fight was just getting going. And if his foot was OK and the fight was going from there when he was on the ground, I don’t know,” Sterling continued. It makes it tough to take that away from Chito, but I don’t think that type of fight ending could really put a damper on O’Malley’s performance, what he was able to do the 1-2 minutes before that if that makes sense. It was just such a short fight. You can’t really put too much stock into that.”
Sean O’Malley has also called the win flukish as he believes he still is undefeated. Although it is a loss on his record, Suga doesn’t think that counts as a real loss because it was due to an injury.
Regardless, O’Malley has gotten a lot of hype back after his KO win over Almeida and perhaps, could rematch Vera down the line.
Do you think Marlon Vera’s win over Sean O’Malley was flukish as Aljamain Sterling says?
