Chael Sonnen just offered his services as a replacement opponent for Craig Jones in the main event superfight at CJI 2. It’s certainly something that nobody could have seen coming, but Sonnen and Jones do have a little bit of history together. There’s no animosity or bad blood involved, but they faced each other in the opening round of the absolute division at ADCC 2017. Jones was fairly unknown at the time and that was actually his breakthrough year, as he had just finished fourth at under 88kg before this match. Sonnen on the other hand was already an MMA legend and had challenged for the UFC world championship three times by this point.
Jones won the match by submission with a heel hook and he’s only gotten significantly better in the years since then, while Sonnen has retired from fighting and is now approaching his 50s. There’s no reason to think this match would go any way other than it did the first time around, even if they modified the rules to ban heel hooks or guard-pulling. The sad truth is that there isn’t going to be many options left for Craig Jones at CJI 2 because there’s less than a week left to go, and Chael Sonnen may actually be the biggest name willing to step in on such short notice.
The only reason that Jones is left in this predicament is because his original opponent Gable Steveson pulled out due to injury right at the last minute. Although the superfight wasn’t actually the main attraction for the event, it was still a pretty big draw and losing it is going to be a big blow. The CJI 2 lineup is still stacked with dozens of elite grapplers battling it out in a team tournament, but there’s no main event to cap things off. Jones is the main man behind CJI of course and he’ll likely still want to headline his own event, but who he faces is still very much up in the air.
FloGrappling shared the news that Chael Sonnen had accepted a superfight against Craig Jones at CJI 2 in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
