Marlon Moraes feels his TKO loss to Cory Sandhagen, which headlined Saturday’s UFC Fight Island 5 card, was “probably a little early.”
Sandhagen put Moraes down with a spinning kick in the bout’s second round. Moraes, however, feels that the fight was going in his favor until that decisive moment, and that that the referee’s intervention might have been a tad premature.
HEEL KICK TO THE DOME 🤯
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“I thought we had a very good first round. But I thought I won the round,” Moraes said during on UFC post-fight show (via MMA Fighting). “And then he started the second and I don’t know, I think he kind of catch me with a kick and bloodied my eye a little bit and right after he surprised me. He didn’t come this way, he came the other way and that’s it.
“Probably a little early stoppage but whatever. I thought I was [OK to continue] but the ref just jumped on me. I didn’t have time enough to get up.”
With this outcome, Moraes returns to the loss column after a razor-close decision victory over former UFC featherweight champion Jose Aldo. While this loss to Sandhagen certainly pulls him further from his desired crack at UFC bantamweight champion Petr Yan, he isn’t letting it discourage him, and vowed post-fight to continue working toward that goal.
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Do you think the referee stepped in a little to early when Marlon Moraes took on Cory Sandhagen in the main event of UFC Fight Island 5 last Saturday?