UFC star speaks out after 'worst heavyweight fight ever'

The Derrick Lewis and Francis Ngannou heavyweight fight was poised to be a thriller when it was announced as the co-main event at UFC 226 – but it certainly did not live up to the hype.

Lewis has recently spoken out about the flop, suggesting his opponent Ngannou was scared.

“To me, whenever he stepped inside the Octagon, he looked scared from the get-go,” Lewis said on The MMA Hour.

“He wasn’t the same guy that I saw at the weigh-ins.

“Like, his facial expressions and his emotions and everything, it wasn’t the same.

“So all of that right there, that threw me off in the fight too, because I didn’t believe that he was really that scared of me, but the look in his eyes, it really did show that he was scared.”

At one stage in the second round, referee Herb Dean literally had to bring the fighters together to tell them they need to engage.

“I was confused too. I tried to make him engage,” Lewis said.

“I did a couple of things to try to make him engage, and he just wouldn’t do it. I believe he was scared of taking a shot.”

The fight quickly turned into a stand-off, and prolific UFC commentator Joe Rogan certainly didn’t hold back in his assessment of the bout.

Rogan repeated that this was a strange fight to watch, and it could be up there with the “most boring heavyweight decisions of all time”.

The record for the least amount of strikes landed in a UFC fight is 23, and the two fighters came extremely close to breaking that when they were at 20 with just 2 minutes remaining.

Once the bout had wrapped up, Joe Rogan continued his brutal take on the highly-anticipated clash.

“That is by far the worst heavyweight fight I’ve ever seen,” Rogan said after the decision.

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“I am baffled by that last fight. (Ngannou) doesn’t need a trainer, he needs a sports psychologist.”

Once Lewis finally got around to watching a replay of the fight, he blatantly disagreed with Rogan’s view.

“I finally watched it, and I thought it wasn’t that bad. Not the way that Joe Rogan was making it sound like,” Lewis said.

“The only reason why I guess they’re saying that it’s the worst fight ever is because they expected so much between me and him, they expected fireworks the whole three rounds and it wasn’t.”

Lewis eventually won the fight on a unanimous decision, but he was shaking his head when the winner was announced.

“I expected the same thing. I was disappointed that it wasn’t an entertaining fight as well.”