Alexander Volkanovski believes the judges failed to take damage into account when scoring Jose Aldo’s fight at UFC 315.
Aldo (32-10 MMA, 14-9 UFC) lost a close decision to Aiemann Zahabi (13-2 MMA, 7-2 UFC) in their featherweight bout on Saturday at Bell Centre in Montreal. All three judges awarded Zahabi Rounds 2 and 3.
Round 3 was a toss-up. Aldo had Zahabi badly hurt after dropping him with a head kick, but the Canadian not only survived, he rallied to finish the fight in top position. Aldo’s body language didn’t help as the former UFC champ looked exhausted. Regardless, Volkanovski thinks Aldo was closer to finishing the fight than Zahabi was.
“I want to talk about the Aldo fight. Obviously, reasonably fair, I get it,” Volkanovski said on his YouTube channel. “But when you talk about damage, I know he ended up very tired on the bottom in that third round. Aldo won Round 1, but they gave the other two to his opponent. The second one, again, very close. Aldo slowed down a little bit in the end of the second round, so maybe that’s why they edged that round to the other guy. I want to talk about the third round. It was clear Aldo pretty much the whole way through that round. I think even the start of that, but in the middle of it, when he hurt his opponent and when we talk damage, it doesn’t get anymore damaging than that.
“He rocked him, dropped him with a punch, then dropped him with a crazy kick. Credit to him not going asleep. I don’t know how he stayed awake from that. That was a proper soccer kick to the head. Gets up, another kick, got dropped like three times. I know he’s tired, and you see him gassed then he gets taken down and he starts getting elbowed, and the guy dominated the last bit, but was that enough when you’re losing most of the round and you got proper beat up where the ref could have stopped it once he got kicked and dropped again? Like, it was that close to being finished.”
A dejected Aldo hinted at retirement after the fight. His matchup with Zahabi was initially a bantamweight bout but shifted to featherweight after Aldo struggled with his weight cut.
