The UFC have announced that Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua won’t fight at UFC 161 after they were unable to establish a suitable opponent for him at short notice following an injury to Antonio Rogerio Nogueira.
It’s a big blow for the Winnepeg, Canada event which had already been forced to regroup after the originally planned main event, an interim bantamweight title fight between Renan Barao and Eddie Wineland, was also scrapped due to an injury.
The new co-main event will be Roy Nelson Vs Stipe Miocic, while in a slightly surprising move a light-heavyweight fight between Ryan Jimmo and Igor Pokrajac has been promoted to main card status instead of Jake Shields Vs Tyron Woodley.
As we reported yesterday, Chael Sonnen did offer to fight ‘Shogun’ at the event, but the word is that while the UFC were interested in making that happen, Visa issues eventually resulted in the idea being shelved for now.
However, all is not lost as it’s believed that the two men have now been targeted for the upcoming ‘UFC On FOX Sports 1’ event on August 17th.
It’s not clear at this stage though if this has been ear-marked to serve as the evening’s main or co-main event. Ideally it would be the latter with something like a lightweight title fight between Ben Henderson and TJ Grant topping the bill, but we’ll just have to wait and see how this all unfolds.
