Back in the 90s there was a dj / producer called The Orb from the UK and he toured extensively all over North America. Or so we thought – it was actually just some British guy in the US pretending to be the Orb and getting paid big bucks to play festivals across the country. I wonder if someone is doing the same thing with Randi Miller’s name. Minus the big bucks of course.
If there wasn’t photographic evidence that it was the same woman in the cage last night who won a bronze medal for wrestling in the 2008 Olympics, that would be my explanation for what we saw last night. No one was expecting her to come in and Rousey her competition in 10 seconds flat. Okay, maybe I was expecting some epic double legs that reduced her opponent’s pelvis to dust. Some thunder and lightning from on high signaling that the Olympians are here. Instead we saw someone who clearly wasn’t ready for the spotlight. And that really sums up a lot of my thoughts about Invicta.
Typically when you get these upstart promotions jumping into the world of streaming events, you end up with crazy technical difficulties and an event that flows for the viewer about as smoothly as sandpaper. But that wasn’t the case with Invicta. To their credit, the stream held up after some early hiccups. The production was tight and slick. The fights came quickly one after another. Mauro ’25 centimeter pole’ Ranallo managed to keep the sexual innuendo to a minimum. Where the show stumbled was in the cage.
Now fairly or not, every time you have a high profile all women’s card like this, the matches are going to be looked at through a different lense than your average fight card. You’d never watch a small MMA show out of Podunk, Redneckistan and base your opinion on the state of men’s MMA on what you saw. But this is the burden the ladies are going to have to put up with for a while as they seek to prove to the world that women’s MMA is just as exciting and awesome as its male counterpart. And in that regard Invicta largely failed.
WMMA cynics will say Invicta provided proof for many of their complaints: that the talent pool isn’t deep enough and we’re only halfway there in terms of quality fighters. And how can we disagree after seeing what we saw for the first half of the card? Those who have been to enough amateur shows or regional promotions would say last night was par for the MMA course, regardless of the sex involved. But when you’re putting a card together and holding it up to show the world what women’s MMA is all about, you need to do better.
It’s not fair that every WMMA fight becomes a mini-referendum on the worthiness of females fighting, but that’s the reality where we are right now. If Invicta wants to build a reputation as a place where the best female fighters compete, then they better take a close look at their matchmaking and make some changes because what we saw last night doesn’t cut it.