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#2 The issue of durability
When you’re talking about fighters like Donald Cerrone and Justin Gaethje – fighters who are quite willing to walk through hell in order to take out the man across the Octagon from them – the question of toughness shouldn’t really come into things. The two Lightweights are a pair of the toughest men to ever set foot inside the UFC. Durability, however, is another thing entirely.
Gaethje has practically been involved in nothing but wars throughout his career, dating back to his days in the World Series of Fighting promotion. ‘The Highlight’ won their Lightweight title but found himself in major brawls with the likes of Luis Palomino and Melvin Guillard along the way. The old joke, in fact, suggested that Gaethje needed to get to the UFC quickly before his chin finally gave out on him.
Well, since arriving in the UFC in 2017, Gaethje has been stopped by strikes twice – but it took Eddie Alvarez and Dustin Poirier a ludicrous amount of violence to put him away, and even then ‘The Highlight’ was never truly knocked unconscious. It seems that despite his history, he’s still unbelievably durable.
Cerrone on the other hand? While durability was a huge strength of his a few years back – witness the beating he took from Nate Diaz, for instance, or the shots he absorbed against Melvin Guillard. He’s slowly become more vulnerable over the years to the point where he suffered nasty TKOs against Jorge Masvidal and Darren Till as part of a three-fight slide in 2017.
Sure, ‘Cowboy’ is still tough as nails, but against a fighter equally as tough in Gaethje, the odds are that it’ll be Cerrone’s chin which cracks first – after all, he’s been in just as many wars and is also 6 years older. And when you add in that Gaethje hits with insane power, this fight seems pretty worrying for ‘Cowboy’.
