UFC 124 Results: GSP vs. Koscheck 2

[Boanerges]

Main Card
Georges St-Pierre def. Josh Koscheck via unanimous decision
Stefan Struve def. Sean McCorkle via first-round TKO
Jim Miller def. Charles Oliveira via submission (kneebar)
Mac Danzig def. Joe Stevenson via first-round KO
Thiago Alves def. John Howard via unanimous decision

Undercard
Dan Miller def. Joe Doerksen via split decision
Mark Bocek def. Dustin Hazelett via submission (triangle)
Jesse Bongfeldt vs. Rafael Natal ruled a majority draw
Sean Pierson def. Matt Riddle via unanimous decision
Ricardo Almeida def. TJ Grant via unanimous decision
John Makdessi def. Pat Audinwood via unanimous decision


* Sooooooo glad to see St-Pierre win even if by decision

[Boanerges]

MONTREAL -- This is the UFC 124 live blog for Georges St-Pierre vs. Josh Koscheck, the main event of tonight's UFC pay-per-view card at the Bell Centre.

St-Pierre (20-2) will put his welterweight title on the line for the fifth straight time against Koscheck, whom St-Pierre coached against on this past season's The Ultimate Fighter. Koscheck (15-4) won this title shot by defeating Paul Daley at UFC 113 in May.

After days of antagonizing the hometown crowd, Koscheck doesn't acknowledge a soul as he walks in to The Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Higher Ground." St. Pierre also walks in stoically, bowing to the crowd before he enters the cage.

Round 1: St. Pierre explodes for a takedown in the opening 20 seconds. Koscheck gets right back to his feet. St. Pierre tags Koscheck with an overhand right. Koscheck dives in for a hook, St. Pierre goes low for a takedown, but Koscheck stays on his feet. Koscheck already has redness around his left eye. St. Pierre shoots in again, Koscheck stops it and scores with a knee to the head before St. Pierre retreats. St. Pierre doubles up on the jab. St. Pierre's jab is connecting consistenly. Koscheck threws a right hook that misses and goes after St. Pierre's legs, moving him against the fence. Koscheck stayed at it and put GSP on his back with :15 left, not enough to steal it. 10-9 St. Pierre.

Round 2: St. Pierre keeps throwing out the jab, and Koscheck's left eye is already swelling badly. St. Pierre looks comfortable on his feet, digging into Koscheck's thigh with a kick. St. Pierre is more active, moving around the cage and initiating. Koscheck looking for the big right. St. Pierre lands a pair of hard rights. Beautiful combinations from the champion, who throw a superman punch/leg kick, landing both ends. St. Pierre punctuates the round with a right hand before the final horn, 10-9 GSP.

Round 3: St. Pierre lands a big right behind the ear in the opening 10 seconds. St. Pierre tries a takedown but Koscheck stops it. From the clinch, St. Pierre lands knees to the legs. St. Pierre digs low for a takedown again, but Koscheck's base is too wide, and he can't secure it. They break at the middle of the round. St. Pierre fires off a few jabs. Koscheck has a hard time avoiding them. Koscheck head-hunts with a kick that misses. Koscheck whiffs on a shoot, St. Pierre punishes him with a right hand and kick. Another round in the books for the champ, 10-9.

Round 4: The doctor looked at Koscheck's eye between rounds and let the fight continue. St. Pierre took Koscheck down quick. Koscheck tried to get up and St. Pierre took his back against the cage, delivering a knee to the head. Koscheck got his back to the fence and GSP held him there until ref Herb Dean restarted them. Koscheck slipped down after a miss. It's the second time he's looked at his foot during the fight. A big left hook landed for St. Pierre. GSP continued to ahammer Koscheck with jabs, and scored witha right hook. Koscheck's eye looks completely shut. Another round to St. Pierre, 10-9.

Round 5: Koscheck comes back for the fifth. A huge left hook early for GSP. Koscheck is a tough guy, but this is a dismantling. Koscheck is mostly a punching bag now. Another left hook. Koscheck can't possibly see anything coming from that side. GSP ducks under a punch and lands a sharp right. Crowd starts singing Koscheck off with half the round remaining. Much of the crowd is standing as St. Pierre's takes Koscheck down twice in a row. The game Koscheck is back to his feet in no time, however. The crowd builds a wave of applause with 30 seconds left and the fighters break. Koscheck tries a spinning back kick. St. Pierre lands a hard right. St. Pierre to the end, and the champion and his antagonist share an embrace after the final horn.

Winner: Georges St. Pierre via unanimous decision (50-45, 50-45, 50-45)
12/11/2010 11:59 PM ET By Mike Chiappetta

[2pwrlftrs4u]

Silva vs GSP needs to happen, if no weight class then the 2 should agree to a weight and just get it done.

[Boanerges]

Georges St. Pierre so totally outclassed Josh Koscheck at UFC 124 on Saturday night that it’s tempting to call his performance one of scariest five-round beatdowns of all time. Unfortunately, St. Pierre is too damn nice to ever be described as scary. In fact, one of the things that’s so great about GSP is that his very being invalidates all of the run-of-the-mill MMA clichés that so often lead us to refer to fighters as “savages” or “warriors” or some other such made-up bullcrap. St. Pierre is a sportsman; a dude who has absolutely no qualms about beating your butt for as long as his job description requires, then sharing an awkwardly lengthy embrace with you inside the cage before getting on the mic and apologizing to the fans for not beating your butt even worse. Frankly, it’s impossible not to like the guy for it.

There is also something uniquely pleasing about seeing karma suddenly catch up with a high school bully in the form of a 25-minute face-pounding. That’s really what made UFC 124 so enjoyable to watch. By the mid-point of the first round in their main event fight, St. Pierre had already beaten Koscheck so badly that he’d transformed the normally ubercocky wrestler into a dude with Tourette syndrome. Lips quivering, jaw working up and down, hands constantly playing with the hem of his trunks as if compelled by some uncontrollable nervous tic, Koscheck knew immediately that whatever game plan he’d spent weeks cooking up back home at AKA, it was dogcrap. Once he realized that St. Pierre had his number, there was nothing he could do but ride it out to the painful end. It was, in a word, glorious.

St. Pierre’s jab – a meme the UFC broadcast team grabbed hold of, jumped on top of and absolutely humped into a living death – was admittedly impressive. Last night he exchanged the slow-and-steady grappling attack we’d seen from him in his last half-dozen outings for a fluid striking game that kept Koscheck at range and made the challenger’s looping overhand right look silly and ineffectual by comparison.

At times it sounded like Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan were just pulling adjectives out of a top hat to try to describe what was going on inside the cage. It was that impressive. The champion’s speed and straight punches flat beat Koscheck to the target. In this case the target was an area above his right eye, which quickly ballooned up like a cartoonish purple toe. Knowing that Koscheck couldn’t beat St. Pierre on his best day, once the dude only had one eyeball left it was sort of understandable that he spent the rest of the contest looking gun-shy and hesitant. We would look that way too if we had to fight Georges St. Pierre wearing half a blindfold.

It was the sort of performance from GSP that left little doubt as to the identity of the current best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. It also made further welterweight competition seem irrelevant for the guy -- if St. Pierre can do this to Koscheck, imagine what he’d do to Jake Shields – and a future move to middleweight appear all but ensured. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a logjam at the top of the 185-pound division at the moment, with Anderson Silva set to take on Vitor Belfort, while Chael Sonnen and Wanderlei Silva will allegedly coach “TUF” and then fight, assumedly with No. 1-contender status on the line.

Rogan also warned us at the tail end of the UFC 124 broadcast that it would take some time for GSP to move up a division. “He wants to do it naturally,” Rogan explained, almost apologetically. Why, we’re sure we don’t know what you mean, Joe. What other way would he do it?

Real talk, though? St. Pierre is so good at this point that he leaves the UFC brass with few options: Either bump him up to 185-pounds or call off the welterweight division entirely, just to save everybody else the embarrassment.
-Cage Potato
-Words in itallics changed by me to follow our TOS

[Boanerges]

Koscheck's eye courtesy of UFC.com

[RhacHead]

I had plans Saturday and wasnt able to catch this bout but that pic is the result I was expecting! Hopefully Koscheck learned something...

[lance]

you know after being in the fight game for over 10 years now I have always wanted to see more boxing utilized I use it in my fights and never see much other fighters utilize the jab so finally seeing GSP use it is a breathe of fresh air to me and proves my point that boxers are a superior fighter on the stand up game I never have lost a fight standing up against a fighter who didn't have boxing skills in there arsenal and ones that have had it were terrible so I think this will give other fighters the push to more boxing

lance

[Luke Martin]

It was pretty much one sided...his eye was so messed up it was funny watching him cringe and pull back when his trainers were trying to mess with it....