Leon Edwards makes this third welterweight title defence on July 27th at the Co-Op Arena in Manchester, England. Despite UFC 304 taking place in the UK, the event will occur during the night on home soil, to cater to the American audience. This means that Edwards can expect to make the ring walk at approximately 5:30 am local time, which is far from ideal.
The welterweight champion is enlisting the help of a sleep coach for his preparation. He has his first meeting with them this Thursday as he looks to adjust his sleep pattern for his fight with Belal Muhammad. The main event at UFC 304 won’t be the first time that Leon Edwards and Belal Muhammad. On March 13, 2021, their first fight was stopped just before the end of the second round due to an accidental eye poke from Edwards. It was one of the nastier eye-pokes that we’ve seen in the UFC, and Muhammad was unable to continue, rendering the fight a no-contest.
Since that night, neither man has lost in the octagon. In fact, Belal Muhammad is riding an impressive ten-fight win streak and the champion an impressive thirteen-fight unbeaten run. Barring a repeat of the first fight or an unlikely draw, one of their runs will come to an end in Manchester. Unsurprisingly, Edwards doesn’t think that it will be his, and seemed rather dismissive of his next opponent:
”I feel like he needs to just, like, calm down. I don’t understand where this confidence is coming from. He has improved since we last fought but I don’t get the confidence and the arrogance and the entitlement. Like, relax, I went through the same, kind of, longer road than he did. It’s all good, we’ll see come July 27th.” – Edwards told Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour.
It’s fair to say that Edwards and Muhammad have some bad blood. The Englishman branded him ‘weird’ and made reference to the fact that Muhammad ‘tweets me every day.’ The champion doesn’t usually make things personal when conducting his business, but his last two fights have been against opponents he doesn’t hold high opinions of. How could we forget the antics in the build-up to his last fight? When Colby Covington made some very dark remarks about Edwards’ deceased father in the UFC 296 pre-fight press conference. Helwani asked Edwards if he was looking for Covington backstage after his comments:
”Yeah, but they [The UFC] moved him. I don’t know where he went but he [Covington] wasn’t backstage at all. I think the security took him away. I don’t know where they put him, but he was somewhere.”
Edwards said that things would have got physical if he had managed to find Covington after the press conference: ”Slap him, that’s what I was looking to do. I feel like he’s not a man, you know? I feel the way he talks and what he says, he should be able to back it up inside and outside the cage. For me, I don’t think he’s a man, he’s a weasel, and it is what it is.”
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