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A tremendous monday night line-up pit SpikeTV’s Ultimate Fight Night against USA network’s WWE Monday Night Raw. I admit that I flipped through the channels and stayed mostly on Raw, but there was no tearing me away from SpikeTV when The Ultimate Fighter 2 began.

After the obligatory recap of the last episode, it was distrubing to see Matt Hughes’ reaction to a team victory, cathartic to see Jorge Grugel leave the competition and comical to see Jason Von Flue freak out over receiving stitches. This almost reminded me of my first time stitching up a cut on my hand. But I cannot blame him, the position of those cuts and under eyes would freak me out too if I knew that’s where they had to sew me up!

The RightGuard Challenge hosted by Randy Couture was inappropriately titled “last man standing”, when it is, essentially, heavyweight mud wrestling. By now the challenges are decidedly geared towards grapplers and wrestlers. I’d like to see future challenges focus more on other aspects of fighting arts, maybe a competition geared towards muay thai?

Once again, we see sore loser Matt Hughes emerge after the challenge competition. Team Hughes, with the exception of Joe Stevenson, visibly do not care much for Matt’s views.

Matt’s attitude is starting to get on my nerves. I don’t mind a coach who drives the team hard, but to not respect one of your fighters who won a fight for your team certainly shows his true character. No matter how he tries to excuse himself for dismissing Jason so easily for giving up a welterweight, I feel Matt is not worthy for my respect as a coach. Matt has already decided that he himself is the ultimate fighter and this is the Matt Hughes show. Matt wants to win; not for developing his fighters, but for himself.

A match of David vs Goliath was drawn up as the elimination match – Seth Petruzelli vs Dan Christianson. Though it was an obvious size mismatch, the card was more even than expected. Seth was the smaller fighter but is definitely more skilled at striking. He had better timing, distancing and reaction. Dan Christianson was bleeding from the nose after the opening skirmish. It would have been hard for him to breathe. Seth’s quickness did not prevent an inadvertent low blow from stunning him. And just before the 2nd round, he got hit again with another low blow. It’s not fun to be hit down there, and I was cringing from imagining the pain that Seth was experiencing.

Seth was still controlling the fight, putting his hand out to measure distance, letting Dan rush in and countering nicely to land some hits. Both fighters wanted a stand-up fight. I was hearing more useful corner coaching from Rich Franklin, telling Seth how to position himself. However, Dan’s high kick landed cleanly to drop Seth to the ground. Seth recovered into a close guard position. Perhaps Seth was stunned, but I felt that he wanted to stand up and simply held onto Dan to force the referee’s break.

Seth returned the favour immediately with a beautiful spinning heel kick that brought Dan to his knees. Seth gets more aggressive with a take down but could not get an advantage in the half guard. The round was hard to score as both fighters were caught with kicks that hurt them and both fighters recovered adequately. Overall, I felt that Seth was still leading the fight going into the third round.

Seth was constantly switching stance, kicking and punch from either side. He caught Dan’s leg as he rushed in and was on top of a closed guard. Now usually, such a position is good for offense. However, the size mismatch was so big that being on top might have been more exhausting for Seth. Seth may have felt that he was ahead on points and remain passive to end the third round. There was no question that Seth was the aggressor and controlled the fight. He was awarded the win with a unanimous decision.

After all is said and done, it will be interesting to see how Ultimate Fighter 2 ratings along with the new TNA Impact Wrestling will hold up against WWE’s Monday Night Raw. Monday is fast becoming my favourite television night!

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