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Casey O'Neill suffered the first loss of her professional MMA career against former title challenger Jennifer Maia at UFC 286. While Maia emerged victorious, she claimed that O'Neill was greased up in the fight which stopped the Brazilian from imposing her wrestling game.
Did Casey O'Neill grease up to fight Jennifer Maia?
It has not been proven whether Casey O'Neill was greased up for her UFC 286 fight. The topic died out a few days after the event and the UFC does not seem to have taken the accusation seriously.
O'Neill fired back at Jennifer Maia for accusing her of using some underhanded tactics in their fight. In her post-fight presser, the Brazilian called foul play on O'Neill's part and claimed the Scottish-Australian's slipperiness threw her off her game. Maia also revealed that she had to abandon her grappling game plan and stick to boxing due to the slipperiness. She said via a translator:
"I’m happy with my performance... I really wanted to show you guys my ground game, but Casey was very greased up, very oily, very slippery, and that really threw me off... Definitely, I know it was not just sweat."
It didn’t take long for Casey O’Neill to catch wind of Jennifer Maia’s accusations and take her to task. 'King' took to Twitter to accuse the No.8-ranked flyweight of lying and promised to avenge the defeat down the line.
Quote-tweeting a post from MMA Junkie, O'Neill wrote:
"Damn, you won girl.. now you gotta make up lies because your wrestling wasn’t good ? Just take the win and move on. It won’t happen next time we fight."
Casey O'Neill reveals text conversation with Jennifer Maia after 'grease gate' accusations
Casey O'Neill wasn't going to let Jennifer Maia get away with accusing her of greasing in their fight and posted a screenshot of their conversation via text.
The 26-year-old Australian took to the comments section under the aforementioned post to share her response. Denying all wrongdoing, O'Neill attacked Maia for lying, citing that maybe her improved takedown defense flustered the Brazilian. She wrote:
"Liar, just wasn’t good at wrestling and I spent months improving my take down defense."
Furthermore, Casey O'Neill posted a screenshot of her conversation with Jennifer Maia, revealing that she confronted the Brazilian for her press conference statements. Though the conversation appeared to be respectful, 'King' seemingly wasn't satisfied and accused Maia of misleading people. She wrote:
"A bit misleading also as it seems by her message ? Or maybe she’s changed her mind now."
Jennifer Maia left London victorious but lost her next fight against Viviane Araujo by unanimous decision. The UFC released Maia after her contract expired in October 2023. Meanwhile, O’Neill suffered her second consecutive defeat against Ariane Lipski at UFC 296 in December 2023.
She will return to action against Luana Santos at UFC 305 on August 17. O'Neill was originally scheduled to fight Tereza Bleda on the card. However, Bleda withdrew from the fight due to undisclosed reasons and was replaced by Santos.
