UFC San Antonio gets heavyweight rematch between Ben Rothwell and Andrei Arlovski

Last week, the UFC’s return to Texas, UFC San Antonio, had a whopping six whole fights announced. Well, there’s more where that came from.

ESPN confirmed on Monday that the July 20 event will be getting a rematch of a fight from 11 years ago that took place in the short-lived promotion that was Affliction. It will be the former UFC heavyweight champion, “The Pitbull” Andrei Arlovski (27-18) squaring off once again with Ben Rothwell (36-11).

In their first meeting, Arlovski would get the better of Rothwell via third-round knockout. Therefore making it the last time that Rothwell lost in that fashion (excluding his TKO loss to Cain Velasquez in his UFC debut).

Incredibly, the now 40-year old Arlovski has fought an astounding 28 times since then compared to Rothwell’s 12. However, both fighters happen to be going through rough patches of their own.

For Rothwell, he just recently returned from a three-year hiatus after being dealt a two-year USADA suspension. In his comeback fight, he took on former World Series of Fighting champion, Blagoy Ivanov at UFC Wichita where he would suffer a unanimous decision loss thus putting him on a two-fight skid.

Arlovski, on the other hand, is 2-8 (1 NC) in his last 11 outings and is currently winless in his last four. The Belarusian’s last time out was late last month at UFC Fort Lauderdale when Augusto Sakai would walk away with the split decision nod in their three-round affair.

UFC San Antonio has yet to have its main event announced but the card that’s been put together so far is looking pretty solid.

• Flyweight – 125lbs: Liz Carmouche vs Roxanne Modafferi
• Bantamweight – 135lbs: Raquel Pennington vs Irene Aldana
• Heavyweight – 207-265lbs: Alexey Oleynik vs Walt Harris
• Heavyweight: Ben Rothwell vs Andrei Arlovski
• Light Heavyweight – 205lbs: Sam Alvey vs Klidson Abreu
• Featherweight – 145lbs: Alex Caceres vs Steven Peterson
• Bantamweight: Mario Bautista vs Jin Soo Son
• Bantamweight: Domingo Pilarte vs Felipe Colares

This article first appeared on  5/20/2019