Henry Cejudo’s first bantamweight title defense will come against Jose Aldo at UFC 250 in Sao Paulo, Brazil on May 9th.
It’s a somewhat controversial booking as Aldo actually lost his last fight against Marlon Moraes by split decision, but Dana White was amongst those who believed that the former featherweight kingpin had done enough to win.
However, it was far from a robbery as media outlets were split almost half-and-half as to who the winner was, while the Fightmetric stats showed Moraes had narrowly edged out Aldo in terms of significant strikes in two of the three rounds.
Neverthless, Cejudo and Aldo were eager to fight each other and White was on-board too, so that’s the fight that’s been made.
The Moraes fight had been Aldo’s first at bantamweight after having dropped down a division following a unanimous decision loss to Alexander Volkanovski in May of last year.
Before that he’d picked up two wins in a row over Jeremy Stephens and Renato Moicano, both of which ended by TKO.
As for Cejudo, the champion is currently riding a five-fight winning streak that’s seen him accomplish great things in a relatively short space of time.
The run began with wins over Wilson Reis and Sergio Pettis, but then he took things to a whole new level when he became the man to finally dethrone long-time flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson by split decision.
He then defended the belt against the bantamweight champion at the time, TJ Dillashaw who he TKO’d in just 32 seconds, and then moved up to 135lbs and beat Moraes by TKO to claim the vacant bantamweight title.
Cejudo vs. Aldo fronts a UFC 250 card that will also feature what may well be Antonio Rogerio Nogueira’s retirement fight against Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua, while Fabricio Werdum returns from suspension to face Alexei Oleinik.
