Why so confident in Silva Blunt? I'm thinking this one will be close.
Silva won the Madadi fight because Madadi continually backed himself up against the cage and stood right in front of him. Pichel is much better at circling out and taking the center. Silva had a difficult time with Malegarie, who showed better lateral movement and mixed in a few level changes. It was close, but I actually scored that fight for Malegarie. Silva's defensive wrestling is pretty good, but Pichel doesn't necessarily need takedowns here to have success. He's shown the ability to grind on guys against the fence and do damage there.
The obvious concern with Pichel is him having less than a round of fight time in the last 3.5+ years. It could have been ring rust but I thought he looked off against Brown, until Brown ran face first into that right hand. It's hard to really know what version of Pichel we're getting here with the inactivity though.
No bets for me yet, but right now I'm thinking the over might have value and possibly a stab at either guy's decision line. I think it's fairly likely to go the distance and be close on the cards, maybe even a split.
