WHEN Paul Daley enters the cage at Bellator London 179 on May 19 he knows the promotion is hoping newly signed UFC icon Rory MacDonald beats him.
The baby-faced veteran has been in the game too long to not spot a trick like having a big name like him fall to a young prospect like Brennan Ward or MacDonald.
Semtex has been that young hungry lion – feeding on a fallen idol – so he saw Ward coming a mile off in his last fight and shattered his face with a terrifying knee.
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And – at 35 and in a serene state of mind – he is not ready to be the first big name Bellator can etch on MacDonald’s record when they meet at Wembley arena.
Daley stumbled into the sport at 19 and has faced some of the biggest names in the game – he has made huge mistakes, paid the price and earned it back.
In the build-up to his headline fight, SunSport looks back with him at the key fights that shaped his unrivalled career for highs and lows ahead of Bellator 179…
MMA debut – John Connelly – 2003
Just the name of the promotion Daley made his debut in sets the tone for the type of blood sport he entered as a dangerous teenager.
At Extreme Brawl 3 in a Bracknell leisure centre he took on a middleweight almost a foot taller than himself.
Connelly was a serious mixed martial artists training at Conor McGregor’s now celebrated Straight Blast Gym – Daley was a street fighter with venomous hands.
Daley explains: “I actually saw John Connelly at a BAMMA event in Ireland the other day cornering someone.
“I remember that fight at Bracknell Leisure Centre, the sport was so different back then.
“I was such a young guy stepping into that cage at 19 or 20, I was fighting middleweight at 84kgs and this guy came in looking massive, 6ft 5in tall and shredded. He still looks intimidating today.
“I was a street brawler who just happened to come into the sport and wanted to test myself at fighting.
“At the time he was studying at SBG and working on techniques and the proper way of preparing.
“My preparation was just me and my friends sparring and fighting, so that was intimidating. It was the first time I had ever fought in front of a crowd too.
“I remember Paul walked in looking like Dolph Lundgren and I thought ‘f***ing hell, what am I doing’.
“I remember the cage door shut and I heard the sound of the bolts locking it above all the noise. I was nervous.
“Luckily the bell went, I just ran out and we came together and I threw a big punch and knocked him out and it was all good.
“I never thought it was going to go like that – it gave me a lot of confidence.
“The gap between me being a kid fighting on the streets and a professional fighter was short.
"Even after my first few MMA fights I was still in the streets and trying to be 'The Guy'.
“A lot of it is about your surroundings but the sport influenced that behaviour. It wasn’t even a sport as such, it was just fighting.
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“The name of that first show summed it up and the image was bad. At some of my amateur and early fights there seemed to be a lot of villains and gangsters around.
“Even though I was already fighting in the streets I wasn’t really involved in the sport but when I got in it the image was very much ‘tough in the cage and out of it’.
“It was not until it evolved into the sport that I realised I had to be an athlete and maybe a role model.
"It was not until the sport changed that I did and stopped scrapping in the street and getting into rows.
“That lifestyle and MMA went hand-in-hand at that time but the sport and the image changed and so did I.
“With a lot of combat sports it’s seen as a change for young, underprivileged or wayward kids to channel their energy in a positive way – but that was not the way it was when I started MMA.”
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