KevinIole.com

A day later, Mario Yamasaki’s decision to allow Valentina Shevchenko to continue to batter Priscilla Cachoeira Saturday in their flyweight fight at UFC Fight Night 125 in Belem, Brazil, remains stupefying.

Yamasaki stood by and watched as Shevchenko delivered a frightful beating to Cachoeira. Watching the fight a day later didn’t absolve Yamasaki of any blame.

Here is some of the beating, courtesy of the UFC’s Twitter account:

UFC president Dana White was the most famous among those outraged by Yamasaki’s inaction, but he was hardly alone. But White took to Instagram to vent.

View this post on Instagram

Priscilla Cachoeira, you showed so much heart and toughness in that fight. I’m honored to have you fight in the UFC. Unfortunately the ref is there to protect you and Mario DID NOT do that. This isn’t his first disgusting performance in the octagon. Another unfortunate thing is that i can’t do anything about I️t only the Brazilian commission can and i am hoping after this scary, incompetent showing he hopefully will never set foot in that Octagon again. Strikes landed was 230-3.

A post shared by Dana White (@danawhite) on Feb 3, 2018 at 9:59pm PST

But what shouldn’t be overlooked is the ineptness of Cachoeira’s corner. It is not easy in MMA for the corner to stop the fight, but the job of the corner people, just like it is the job of the referee, is to protect their fighter.

Cachoeira’s corner not only should have asked to have the fight stopped, since Yamasaki wouldn’t do it on his own, but they had an obligation to do so. If, as MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani suggested on Twitter, they were doing it to protect their own interests, it’s even more galling.

Seeing those words almost makes one ill. No win is worth the consequences that could come from a fight like that. According to MMA Fighting’s estimable Guilherme Cruz, who was cageside, Cachoeira injured her knee in the first round. Her manager, Tiago Okamura, told Cruz the injury came early in the fight and left her helpless.

“She tore her meniscus and ACL in the beginning of the first round, the first time they engaged, and it went all downhill from that moment,” Okamura said. “We couldn’t do anything.”

If the corner knew she’d injured the knee early and, as Okamura said, couldn’t do anything, then it’s even more damning they failed to act to protect their fighter. Okamura told Cruz they didn’t learn the extent of the damage until later, but they obviously knew she was injured and lacked mobility against one of the sport’s most fearsome strikers.

They were as much as wrong as Yamasaki in failing to halt the carnage.

Cachoeira should start looking for a new team because this group failed her miserably.