Paul Hughes delivered a statement victory at PFL Belfast, stopping Bruno Miranda in just 42 seconds in front of a sold-out SSE Arena crowd. The lightweight contender, rebounding from a narrow and controversial majority decision loss to champion Usman Nurmagomedov in January, wasted no time in reasserting himself as a top contender. Hughes caught a kick from Miranda, landed a decisive left hook, and finished the fight with ground-and-pound, prompting the referee to step in and end the contest in under a minute.
42-Second KO
Reflecting on the fight, Hughes said, “It’s almost like everything went too perfect. Everything just went beyond better than I envisioned it. I didn’t expect to knock him out in under a minute, to be honest. I kind of wanted to go out and, if anything, I was trying to start with not too much pressure because I didn’t want to get clipped, you know, because Bruno hits hard. But the left hook, it landed, and then that was it. So yeah, I’m feeling good.”
Paul Hughes Demands Rematch with Usman Nurmagomedov
The win immediately reignited calls for a rematch with Usman Nurmagomedov. Their first meeting was a close, five-round contest that left many fans and pundits calling for an immediate rematch. Paul Hughes made his intentions clear, both in the cage and in interviews: “They have to do this fight next. They have to strike while the iron’s hot. Look at the pop that got. The people want to see it, plain and simple. And you’ve got to make the fights that the fans want to see. And look, it’s going to be the biggest fight the PFL have ever done. It’s going to be one of the biggest fights in MMA of the year. Bring it on.”
Paul Hughes added a direct message to Nurmagomedov: “You can run, you can try to delay this as long as you want, but your day is coming!” Nurmagomedov, who remains undefeated and is regarded as one of the top lightweights in the sport, responded to Hughes’s callout by congratulating him but insisted that a rematch would only happen on his terms: “We will do it again but when I say.”
Paul Hughes, for his part, is adamant that the rematch is inevitable and that it is the fight fans want most. Hughes’s perspective on titles is pragmatic: “Belts come and go and I don’t really care that much about them. I care about what they bring. I’ll go to the grave with this: as I always said in the leadup to this fight, fighting in the SSE Arena, which is the biggest arena you can do here in Belfast, that was my number one. And I’ve done that now. That’s ticked off. So I’ll go to the grave happy. Honestly, I truly, truly will.”
Beyond the cage, Paul Hughes continues to use his platform to highlight issues important to him, including mental health funding in Northern Ireland. “Mental health charities are completely underfunded here in Northern Ireland. We have the highest rates of poor mental health in the UK and we’re the most underfunded in the UK… I feel very strongly about that. We’re obviously a country that’s been through a lot. There’s a lot of trauma, and just the suicide numbers here are out of control. Like, they really, really are. It’s unbelievably sad. So look, it’s only a very, very small help me doing this.”
With his record now at 14-2 and momentum firmly on his side, Paul Hughes has positioned himself for another shot at the lightweight title and a potential rematch with Nurmagomedov, a fight that could be the biggest in PFL history.
