(The UFC should make it interesting and let Leben get hammered for the bout)

UFC middleweight Wanderlei Silva is pretty sure his next opponent will be Chris Leben and that the fight will take place in Toronto in April.

The Brazilian MMA icon revealed the news in a recent interview he did with Fighters Only.

“I think I want to fight in April in Canada — I want to fight in Toronto. I think against Chris Leben. I want to fight with him next,” Silva informed Fighters Only when asked about his eventual return to the Octagon.

“I think he is interesting, he is my size, he is aggressive, he fights to the front (comes forward)," he explained. I think we are going to make an interesting fight.”


The fight will have to get through a few roadblocks before becoming official — namely Silva’s recovery from a torn ACL he incurred preparing for a UFC 120 bout with Yoshihiro Akiyama and a pending DUI case involving Leben, which may prevent "The Crippler" from crossing the Canadian border.
 According to "The Axe Murderer" his injured joint is nearly healed sufficiently enough to begin training on it again.

“This time [I had only] one [operation], but I had one on the other knee before, but now I feel good; I start[ed] my recovery and I feel really good right now. I tore my ACL, it was a really bad knee injury, but now I feel good — its ok,” Silva says.

Leben will have his first court appearance in November to answer charges that he was driving under the influence of more than the legal limit of alcohol in his system last weekend in Hawaii. During the incident, the 30-year-old native of Portland, Oregon crashed his pick-up truck into a guard rail of a Honolulu highway. This is Leben’s second DUI arrest in the past two years. In April, 2008 he was sentenced to 35 days in jail in Portland for a nearly identical offense as well as a parole violation and was forced to pull out from a UFC 85 meeting with Michael Bisping which was rescheduled for UFC 89.

Leben is scheduled to face Brian Stann at UFC 125 in January, but it looks like the UFC is making alternative arrangements, possibly in anticipation that he will likely have to do additional time behind bars for his latest infraction.