(Photo:UFC.com)

In a recent blog entry on Matt Hughes’ personal site, the former Welterweight Champion commented on protege Tommy Speer’s recent destruction at the Ultimate Fight Night 13 event.  For those of you who saw the event, you will recall that Speer was destroyed on the feet by a very sharp looking Anthony ‘Rumble’ Johnson.   Johnson came out strong and after stinging Speer with some solid shots, he unloaded with a flurry of shots that left the promising wrestler in a crumpled heap against the Octagon cage.  It was quite simply, one of the most remarkable KO victories I have seen in a while as far as accumulation of strikes.  Reminiscent, at least of  Phil Baroni’s devastating KO over Champion Dave Menne.

Anyway, Matt Hughes stated that he knew the fight was not a good match-up for Speer once he took a closer look at Johnson’s fight history and had a look at him prior to the fight.  Obviously, hind sight is 20/20 but Hughes states that the outcome should not be taken as a lack of preparation on Speer’s part.

“First I’d like to say that Tommy was prepared for his fight, but it was just a bad match-up to be honest. I had nothing to do with putting the fight together, but after I saw the weigh-in and more of Johnson’s credentials, I knew that it was a bad match up for Tommy. So, bad match-up = a bad night.”

Hughes seemed to have enjoyed the fights despite the loss for Speer, making mention that most of the fights went the way he predicted.  The one exclusion, as was the case for most people, was that he didn’t see the Houston Alexander fight ending the way it did.

“The one thing I didn’t think would happen was Houston getting knocked out with one punch…”

Matt also commented on the Karo Parisyan loss, mentioning that he wasn’t entirely upset with that result and felt that the KO loss was a fair result given the way Parisyan had been “running his mouth” about Hughes for a long time.

Like most fighters who blog, it is nice to see a fighter’s perspective on events and Matt Hughes is rarely short on opinions.  Hopefully the former champion is back in the Octagon soon.

Check out the entire blog entry on Matt’s site here.