“Everyone’s gonna put on a little facade for the camera and say what they think they’re supposed to say,” Tom Aspinall explains, sat across a table in the UFC’s fighter hotel in Canary Wharf. It’s just been put to the Wigan heavyweight that Leon Edwards and Kamaru Usman have pushed their own, simple narratives leading into UFC 286, where they will clash for the third time on Saturday, at the O2 Arena.
For Edwards, who took the welterweight title from Usman with a jaw-dropping, jaw-splintering head kick in August, the narrative is this: After winning the first round of his rematch with Usman seven months ago, by becoming the first man to take down the Nigerian-American, the altitude in Salt Lake City sapped his strength, leading to the static, sub-par stretch that preceded his stunning finish; without that external factor, the 31-year-old expects to not only finish his old foe again, but to do it with more than one minute left on the clock.
