UFC welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre will take on nemesis Nick Diaz in the main event of UFC 158 that’s set to take place on Saturday night in Canada. Nick Diaz is a huge underdog according to the odds makers and for good reason since stylistically GSP is a matchup nightmare for him.
Diaz has eight career losses with six of those losses coming against fighters that were able to take him down and avoid his submission attempts from the bottom.
GSP is the best wrestler in MMA wit superb submission defense with the ability to pass his opponents guard with ease.
There are some folk out there that believe Diaz has gotten into the head of GSP and will force him to fight off emotion and anger. While Diaz certainly has the ability to trash talk his opponents while fighting them, I don’t think GSP will buy into that nor will he spend much time striking with Diaz on the feet.
GSP is the more accurate striker and will have a slight reach advantage believe it or not. Diaz is highly susceptible to leg kicks in which GSP will probably exploit at some point, but the majority of the fight will be spent with GSP pounding on Diaz while in his half-guard.
There are two huge drawbacks for Diaz that will most likely cost him this fight:
- He almost totally relies on punches and rarely kicks, which means that’s one less thing for GSP to worry about on the feet.
- His aggressive style of coming forward will make him even more susceptible to takedowns.
Diaz’s best chance of winning this fight is catching GSP in the later rounds with a punch that stuns GSP and then finishing him via TKO. Now, we saw GSP get hit with a flush head kick from Carlos Condit and recover fairly quickly. Diaz isn’t known for having huge power in his punches as most of the damage is simply due to accumalation of strikes over time. However, to his credit Diaz has superb conditioning and the ability to absorb tremendous amounts of punishment, which means he’s always a dangerous opponent.
With that being said, this fight will simply be history repeating itself for Diaz. He’s never been able to overcome fighters that have been able to take him down and avoid submissions. He’s most certainly not going to start altering history against arguable the best MMA fighter on the planet in GSP.
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