2017 seems to be a year full of ugly new trends, so why not one more: cornermen being forced to jump into the cage to save their MMA fighters from clueless referees. It happened once already near the start of the year in India, and now it’s happened again in Brazil where the whole situation nearly devolved into an ugly brawl.
Silmar ‘Sombra’ Nunes and Caio Silva were featured as the headlining bout at Capanema Fight Combat on September 23rd, and everything went horribly wrong when Nunes caught Silva in a guillotine choke that left him unconscious within seconds. But for some reason the referee didn’t stop the fight, even after lifting and dropping Silva’s limp arm.
Enter Silva’s cornerman and brother, who is also a fighter. He jumped the cage to stop the fight, but took things even further by attacking Nunes and setting off a mini riot in the cage with other coaches and corners jumping in to pull everyone apart.
“It took 24 seconds between the moment my brother went out and the moment I came in,” Dax Vinicius Silva told MMAFighting.com. “If I haven’t jumped in, what would have happened? I was wrong, and I apologized to ‘Sombra,’ but I don’t think it was a mistake to enter the cage. When would the referee stop the fight? My brother could have had brain damage or even died.”
To Silva’s credit, he managed to slip out from under Dax and immediately checked on his opponent to see if he was all right.
Now here’s the kicker: it turns out the referee for the fight wasn’t a referee at all but another MMA fighter that was attending the event as a spectator. After a conflict of interest was raised regarding the original referee, the promoter pulled this guy out of the crowd to officiate the fight. Even knowing that, we have to wonder how someone who has trained as a fighter could have missed one opponent being strangled completely unconscious.
