Daniel Kelly is coming off of the biggest win of his professional MMA career, defeating former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Rashad Evans by decision at UFC 209.
With that big win behind him, the next opponents Kelly would like to face are two Brazilian MMA legends.
“(Fighting) Vitor would be awesome,” Kelly said to Submission Radio. “Look, outside of the top six – well now we’ve got GSP who’s thrown a spanner in the – not a spanner, he’s made the title picture a little bit more interesting. So you got Bisping, GSP, Yoel Romero, Luke Rockhold, Jacare, Rob Whittaker, Mousasi, they’re all fighting for the title thing at the moment. Anyone down from that I’d be happy to fight, more than happy to fight. Anderson Silva’s everyone’s dream to fight him, isn’t it? So outside of everyone going, ‘I want to fight Conor McGregor,’ Anderson Silva would be awesome. Another former champion, same as Vitor, but Anderson would be really cool. But we’ll see what they offer me in the next week or so. As long as it’s a ranked guy, I don’t really mind.”
The veteran middleweight now has six wins under the UFC banner. Even Kelly himself admits the win over Evans was a big one in his career.
“This is one of the big ones,” Kelly said. “This is one of the really, really big ones. I said in a post-fight interview thing that I did, that in Judo I beat some world Olympic medalists and got close to winning a medal myself and never quite got there, and beating guys like Rashad and starting to move up is kind of washing away some of the – not regret, but some of the disappointment. I didn’t quite get a world or Olympic medal, this is starting to push that away as I’m progressing along. So it’s like a new life for me. So this was a really big one because it was under a bit of pressure that I put on myself, on a massive card, and people again didn’t expect me to win really. So yeah, massive, massive, massive, massive win.”
