Photo by Tristan Tamayo/INQUIRER.net
Eduard Folayang turned 35 on the eve of the biggest fight of his career—one that would once again put him at the top of ONE Championship’s lightweight food chain.
On Friday night, he delivered exactly the drama required of him: a scintillating performance adorned by his signature moves, a reclamation of a sterling hardware in the very place he lost it, a defiance to father time and a boost to national cause.
Folayang, the striker out of Benguet’s famed Team Lakay, defeated Singapore’s Amir Khan via unanimous decision in front of a partisan crowd inside a Mall of Asia Arena that was filled to the rafters.
“I already expected that he had a good knockout punch,” Folayang said. “And the best thing to do about it is to avoid it and to protect yourself from those attacks.”
“I expected him to prepare well for this fight,” Folayang added. “It’s his first opportunity to fight for a title. The team was able to [go into] the details of what he wanted to do. We predicted the techniques he wanted to apply.”
“We’re grateful we’ve been able to stop all those attempts and execute the game plan against him,” he added.
Tentative in the opening stanza, Folayang unleashed spinning back fists after spinning back fists to push the pace and even bring Khan to the ground in what could’ve been an encore of his ground-and-pound finish that earned him the lightweight title in 2016.
The 24-year-old fighter out of Evolve MMA tried to match the Filipino’s intensity. Banking on his reach, Khan fired counters and even caught Folayang with a couple of crisp straights.
Before the tussle, a promo of the former champion flashed on three screens. It showed Folayang warning that his foe will be “facing a different ‘Landslide.’”
And boy did he walk the talk.
Later that night, Brandon Vera, who has juggled a showbiz stint with his martial arts career, made quick work of Italy’s Mauro Cerilli with a stunning left hook a minute and four seconds into their heavyweight match to remain champion.
The Filipino-American heavyweight’s defense gives the Philippines a total of five championships—four of which belonging to Team Lakay.