'He is good, but he is green': Janicic opens the main card

Friday night, the stage in Belgrade Arena, and the man stepping onto the scale has not lost a fight since November 2019. The applause started before the number was read out. Milos Janicic climbed down, turned to the crowd, then offered his hand to Noah Gugnon, the Frenchman who becomes his first UFC opponent on Saturday.

The scale read 156 pounds for Janicic and 155 for Gugnon. Lightweight, both inside the limit, no last-gram theatre. Their fight opens the main card.

The staredown stayed calm. That was not the pattern on that stage: Dana White himself had to step between Borislav Nikolic and Marko Vologdin, and organisers pulled apart Vlasto Cepo and Gilbert Urbina.

The biceps nobody knew about

It was only after the weigh-in that Janicic mentioned a problem from the opening weeks of camp. He spoke at 5.54 p.m., minutes after leaving the scale.

“The camp went well, thank God. I had a biceps injury at the start, but I sorted it out. Everything is fine, the conditioning, the shape, the sharpness. It is good that the UFC is coming here. I analysed him, I know how the fight should go, but once the fight starts everything becomes different. I believe in myself. He is good, but he is green. I think I will be able to bring this home my own way, to take the first step. I just have to watch out for his takedowns and defend them. All of this feels easy to me. Experience must be doing its job. I am fighting one man, and it is a different platform, a different stage. It is still me against him, and that is that. I hope it starts a chain, win after win. If the other guys win it means a lot, because we want to win too. I am opening the main card, and it would be good to open it with a win.”

Three things in that answer are worth keeping. The biceps injury had not been public until Friday night. He named his own risk, the takedowns, which fighters rarely do the day before a bout. And he treats his slot on the card as a duty rather than a reward.

Who is Noah Gugnon?

Gugnon is French and he is also making his first UFC appearance in Belgrade. Two debutants share the load, which is what makes Janicic’s line interesting. “Green” is a label that travels back easily, because on Saturday he too walks into the cage under that logo for the first time.

The difference sits in the mileage before it. Janicic arrives on an eight-fight winning run built across regional promotions, and at 29 he lands in the age bracket where lightweight tends to be kindest.

The numbers behind the Cobra

• a professional record of 19 wins and 3 losses, the last defeat in November 2019
• 11 wins by knockout or technical knockout and 8 by submission, meaning not one of the 19 reached the judges
• eight straight wins before the debut
• the first fighter from Montenegro to compete in the UFC, training in Novi Sad at the CDS club

The second line is the one that matters. A fighter who finished all 19 does not know what a decision win feels like, but he also does not know what it is like to be rescued by a scorecard. He hunts the finish, and three full rounds are not his natural habitat.

When he fights and what follows

The preliminary bouts start at 4 p.m. and the main card at 7 p.m. Janicic against Gugnon is the first item on it, followed by Vlasto Cepo against Gilbert Urbina, Dusko Todorovic against Robert Valentin, Aleksandar Rakic against Marcin Tybura and Jan Blachowicz against Navajo Stirling. Uros Medic and Daniel Rodriguez close the night at welterweight.

Janicic has not been this calm all week. At the press conference he was far sharper, which is where our earlier piece on his call-out of Bojkovic came from, and on Friday there was no needling and no raised voice, only an outstretched hand.

To me that reads as a man who spent his nerves early and left them outside the cage. If Gugnon’s takedowns do not land in round one, they are unlikely to land later. The answer comes on Saturday, August 1, from 7 p.m.