Alexander Volkanovski is still the UFC featherweight champion, and Movsar Evloev is no longer undefeated. Volkanovski stopped Evloev by TKO at 4:54 of Round 2 in the UFC 333 main event Saturday night at the Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi, with referee Marc Goddard waving it off just a handful of seconds before the horn.
Evloev walked in on a 20-fight winning streak. He walked out with his first career loss.
The first round was close enough to start arguments. Evloev got Volkanovski down more than once, but the champion kept getting back up almost as fast as he hit the mat, and Cageside Press described Evloev’s problem as taking Volk down being easy while keeping him there was something else entirely. Evloev also landed a pair of clean left hooks in the middle of the cage. MMA Weekly scored the opening frame 10-9 for the challenger, and Bloody Elbow called it nearly impossible to score.
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Round 2 is where it flipped. Evloev ducked a right hand and got another takedown, only for Volkanovski to reverse into side control and start dropping punches from the top. Evloev scrambled up, then ate a right hand that stunned him. Volkanovski, cut under his left eye by then, started stringing combinations together, and the head movement that worked for Evloev early stopped working. Another big right hurt him badly. Bloody Elbow reported Evloev turned away and went to the floor, and Volkanovski followed him down and kept swinging until Goddard jumped in.
The context
MMA Weekly reported this was Volkanovski’s second title defense of his second reign at 145 pounds. Evloev had been waiting years for this shot. Bloody Elbow pointed out he’d won nine UFC fights without a single stoppage, a grinding style that probably kept him out of title contention longer than his record deserved.
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The room was a strange one. Bloody Elbow reported the record-setting crowd of 18,000 gave Volkanovski a fairly lukewarm reception, while Evloev, a devout Muslim, got a hero’s welcome on the walk. The crowd’s guy got rocked in the final minute of Round 2 and stopped with seconds left.
The praise came quickly. Michael Chiesa wrote on X that “Volk is one of the best to ever lace up 4oz gloves.”
As for what’s next, Volkanovski is 38, and he told Daniel Cormier after the fight that because he took so little damage, he’d think about fighting again. No opponent, no date, nothing official from the UFC yet.
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Quick take
Evloev did what everybody expected him to do. He wrestled, he got his takedowns, he probably banked the first round. And it barely mattered, because Volkanovski treated every trip to the mat like a minor inconvenience and kept setting up the right hand. At 38, he just took a 20-fight unbeaten streak apart in front of a crowd that wanted the other guy. If he says he wants to keep going after a night where he barely got touched, I’m not going to be the one telling him to stop.
