(Ant Frosh is BPL's MMA expert.)

UFC 118 saw MMA legend Randy Couture defeat former boxing world champion, James Toney, without incurring any serious resistance.

At about 15 seconds into the fight, Couture successfully shot in low at Toney's leading leg, taking his heavier opponent down to the mat with consummate ease.  From then on, Couture quickly established a dominant mount position and demonstrated complete control over the MMA debutant. Within a few minutes Couture had submitted Toney with an arm-triangle choke.

One would have to go back to early UFCs to recall anything like this match.  In the opening round of the first UFC back in 1993, Royce Gracie fought boxer Art Jimmerson. Gracie took Jimmerson down early, established a dominant mount position, and Jimmerson tapped out because he found himself completely immobilised.

Both Couture and Gracie emerged from these respective fights without so much as a scratch.  Whilst in the early UFCs, many of the competitors had very little grappling experience and such scenes were common, the modern UFC has been characterised by well-rounded fighters and tight match-ups.

The question is: Why did anyone expect the Couture-Toney bout to be anything other than a UFC throwback?

One oft-cited reason is that none of the boxers in the early UFCs were as accomplished as James Toney. The problem with this reasoning is that while Toney has had a very good professional boxing career, by this fight he was well past his prime. In competitive fighting, like many sports, possessing a high level of talent and skill is of little worth if one's conditioning is vastly inferior to one's opponent's.

The second reason why people might have thought Toney could compete where other boxers have failed is that he had been training on grappling and takedown defence for the nine months leading up to the fight.  Apart from the reality that nine months of grappling training is not going to cut it against an opponent who has been wrestling for nearly 40 years, Toney's choice of trainer was highly questionable.  Toney was training with a defensive tactics instructor. This is training more suitable for security staff in the hospitality industry looking to deal with unruly patrons.  It's not going to prepare you for dealing with Randy Couture - a world-class wrestler whose MMA career has seen him inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame.

So, will Toney's defeat see the end of the "how would Mike Tyson have gone in the UFC" talk? Given that Toney was clearly well past his prime, it can be argued that a world-class boxer at the top of their game has not yet competed in MMA. I suspect that some boxing fans will still cling to this in any Boxing v MMA argument. Nevertheless, I look forward to the (possible) day when the best boxer in the world takes on the best MMA fighter in the world, inside the Octagon, although I predict that the result would be much the same as we have seen in UFC 118.