Squeezed into a jam-packed Aotearoa sporting calendar is a low key epic #KiwiUFC bout as Brad Riddell takes on Gregor Gillespie at UFC Fight Night on Sunday afternoon.

Win or learn. For a team like City Kickboxing, defeats to Carlos Ulberg and Israel Adesanya at UFC 259 will provide a funky platform for them to build upon moving deeper into 2021.

This Sunday Aotearoa's UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya moves up a weight division in pursuit of Champ-Champ status against light heavyweight champion Jan Blachowicz.

In the midst of a global pando, with the City Kickboxing coaches scattered around the world servicing their Kiwi-UFC fighters and their Junior Fa led boxing crew, Dan Hooker casually fought two of the more ruthless scrappers in the UFC lightweight division.

Consider Dan Hooker vs Michael Chandler the perfect start to 2021 for Aotearoa's City Kickboxing.

In 2019, City Kickboxing grabbed a couple UFC Championships and along with the likes of Dan Hooker sealing his spot among the best lightweights and Brad Riddell blasting his way into the UFC lightweight division, many viewed CKB as the 2019 team of the year.

After putting the microscope on Israel Adesanya as he kinda just did what he does best against Paulo Costa, it's time to suss out Brad Riddell's win over Alex da Silva in the lightweight division.

After dismantling his latest UFC middleweight title challenger, Israel Adesanya stated that defeating Paulo Costa was the 100th 1-outs win of his career.

After laying everything out for the Kiwi-UFC City Kickboxing takeover of UFC 253 on Sunday (NZT), here we have some more specific details and the best content around the CKB whanau in United Arab Emirates.

Of all the kiwi sports yarns to come out of the 2020 hibernation, the preparation of City Kickboxing's UFC fighters and takeover of this weekend's UFC 253 in the United Arab Emirates is my pick for the funkiest yarn to spin.

In losing to Dustin Poirier over the weekend, Aotearoa's Dan Hooker bumped his UFC lightweight stocks up a wee bit in playing his role in an epc fight.

After a few months in the abyss, Aotearoa's UFC fighters are about to hit blast off on their 2020 ascension and when specifically referring to City Kickboxing, it's a blast off to establishing the Auckland gym/team as the best in the world.

In true UFC fashion, they are battlin' on through and will continue to churn out events as best as they can.

For many, culture in a sports or team context isn't real and is brushed aside as a cliche.

City Kickboxing represent combat sports in Aotearoa to the fullest, having aligned with the fighting excellence of those who came before CKB and this lineage is not only manifest in the current existence of CKB, also in how they go about their business inside the octagon.

Coming to the octagon after the glorious encounter between champion Weili Zhang and Joanna Jedrzejczyk in the UFC women's strawweight division, Israel Adesanya and Yoel Romero put on a show that ain't going to be described as fan-friendly.

All sorts of Israel Adesanya content to get you frothing for UFC 248 where Adesanya fights Yoel Romero.

This Sunday, Israel Adesanya has his second UFC middleweight title defence against Yoel Romero.

UFC Fight Night Auckland saw City Kickboxing win all three of their fights and as a mark of their dominance, this is the second time in 12 months CKB have enjoyed three wins on the same UFC card.