I’d be pretty terrified right now if I were Thales Leites.
Anderson Silva is scary enough when he’s just fighting a normal, everyday fight, but he’s seeking to prove to the world that his average (by Silva standards) performance against Patrick Cote in 2008 was a fluke.
In essence, he’s trying to prove that he could have finished Cote any time he wanted to, which likely means Thales Leites is in for a very short and very painful night.
Kevin Iole’s column on Yahoo expands on the subject:
“The Spider” isn’t a braggart and isn’t the sort to make outlandish predictions. But it’s obvious that he’s aware of the criticism he received following the Cote fight and that he intends to make a statement and, in essence, set the world straight.
“I wasn’t very happy with the way that the fight ended,” said Silva, who said he felt a kick he delivered in the second round is what wound up injuring Cote. “I felt that my performance was good in the fight. I felt that I showed – I executed everything that we did in training. But unfortunately, when he got that kick in the second round and in the third round his knee popped, the fight didn’t necessarily end the way the world and myself would have expected.
“I was definitely aiming to finish him in another way. But that’s just the way the fight goes sometimes.”
As Iole says, one of the scariest things about Silva is that he can basically script the fight in the manner he chooses. Against Cote, he tried to stretch things out a bit and let the audience see more of his fight. Against Leites, I have a strong suspicion that he’s going to try to finish Leites quickly and efficiently.
Even if the fight does go to the ground (where Leites would have his strongest tools available), I don’t think Silva will be at much of a disadvantage. He’s had two of the absolute best jiu-jitsu players in the world in his camp (Jacare and Galvao), and rumor has it that neither man has been able to submit Silva once.
