For nearly four years, I have been writing the blog It's More Than Just A Game, focused largely around my first sporting love: football. From a young age, I was obsessed with the world's most popular game, able to quote the most ridiculous statistics and focusing on seemingly insignificant topics in great detail.
However, over the last 18 months, I have found myself feeling very similar levels of obsession about a new topic, and a sport that has been on the rise around the world in recent years. Introduced to mixed martial arts by my brother in late 2014, it wasn't until I discovered the fights of Anderson Silva, and especially Brock Lesnar, that I started to get the MMA bug. Having recognised the Beast from my younger days of watching professional wrestling, I was intrigued to see how he did in real competition.
I was, and remain to this day, fascinated at the ability of fighters to sense danger, predict reactions and plan two or three moves in advance, making MMA a more violent version of chess. Similarly, the interplay of vastly differing, but equally valuable, fighting styles is also not just interesting, but impressive when you consider the amount that fighters are forced to adapt when fighting different opponents.
So I decided to take my own style of football writing and analysis, and apply it to my new passion. Following UFC 200, I wrote a blog post entitled 'The Rotten Core of MMA', looking at the failed drug tests of both Brock Lesnar and Jon Jones, and the historical endemic use of performance enhancers in the sport. I'll post the link to this below, but in short, it prompted me to launch this new blog, dedicated to the big MMA stories and analysis of key fights and events.
Over the coming months, I'll be posting some of my favourite MMA moments and fighters, and while my current exposure to the sport will mean I focus initially on the UFC, I plan on posting more and more regularly on other organisations, with Bellator, Rizin, BAMMA and One Championship all on my radar.
So welcome to The Weigh-In, and feel free to share your thoughts with me in the comments or on Twitter @TheWeighInMMA.
UFC 200 blog: http://itsmorethanjustagameblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/ufc-200-rotten-core-of-mma.html
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