Michael Bisping: Anderson Silva disrespected ‘everybody’ with performance at UFC 208

Fans in attendance at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center for UFC 208 “paid to watch the fantastic Anderson Silva”, but he just wasn’t delivering.

Those are the sentiments of UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping, who is one of many fighters to criticize Silva’s lackluster performance against Derek Brunson last Saturday.

Silva, who scored his first official win in almost five years, earned a unanimous decision against Brunson but didn’t really land any significant strikes. There was plenty of showboating and taunting on display but ‘The Spider’ was hesitant to pull the trigger.

Brunson, who slipped from No. 8 to No. 9 in the official middleweight rankings, initially vowed to appeal the loss but changed his mind on Thursday.

‘The Count’ said Silva disrespected the fans at UFC 208 and was baffled by how he let his opponent tee off on him at several points throughout the bout.

“He was kind of disrespecting everybody there, disrespecting his opponent,” Bisping said on his Sirius XM show The Countdown (h/t Damon Martin of FOX Sports).

“At times, he grabbed the Thai clinch on Derek Brunson, had the Thai clinch but didn’t do anything. Didn’t throw an elbow, certainly didn’t throw a knee, and he allowed Brunson to just tee off with like 10, 15 punch combinations to Anderson Silva while Anderson just held him. It’s just bizarre.”

Bisping, who earned a hard-fought decision win over the Brazilian at UFC Fight Night London last February, is still a fan of Silva but didn’t think he deserved the win against Brunson.

“Now I’m not trying to kick a man while he’s down, I’m really not, because I bought the pay-per-view to watch Anderson Silva,” Bisping said. “Regardless of what’s happened between the two of us, I’m a fan of Anderson Silva and he still always brings that excitement and even still right up until the final bell of a 15-minute fight you still thought ‘hold on is he going to pull something amazing out of the bag?’ but he didn’t.

“What he did was he allowed Brunson to out work him so when he went to decision, everybody, and we had a few people over, my manager and some of his staff came over and we had some friends there, there was about 20 people in the house and everybody thought Derek Brunson was going to get the decision and of course it went to Anderson Silva, which was shocking. I guess maybe you could see an argument for Anderson winning rounds one and two but it was just a bizarre performance.”

Bisping even went as far to say that Silva, a former pound-for-pound great, is tarnishing his legacy.

“He’s tarnishing his legacy,” Bisping said. “Let’s put it like that.”

Silva fired back at the critics in a Facebook post on Wednesday, saying that he’s still ‘the best in the world’.

Bisping, who is currently recovering from knee surgery, is expected to return to the Octagon in May to defend his MW title against the feared Yoel Romero.