The Tuesday Leg Lock Report 05.06.08

Posted by Justin Thomas on 05.06.2008

The Tuesday Leg Lock comes back with your Tuesday dose of news! My thoughts on DREAM 2, The Ultimate Fighter 7, Affliction's future, Leben's arrest, Nick Diaz's next fight and more inside!

Welcome to another edition of The Tuesday Leg Lock Report! I thought that I'll have watched DREAM 2 by Monday, but unfortunately I didn't catch it, so this week's column lacks content a little, sorry about that. Anyways, not much news this week, so I'll review TUF7's last episode and the show in general. Get ready for the Tuesday Leg Lock!




DREAM 2 thoughts



Unfortunately, I was not able to catch DREAM 2 on HDNet, but I've still seen a few fights on the internet and I'll try to give my thoughts on the event.

-Shinya Aoki vs. Gesias Calvancante. This surprised me. Somehow, after seeing the first fight, I thought that Aoki won't get JZ on the ground, but he managed to pull a jumping guard and then the various submission attempts started. Gesias was able to defend and it almost looked like the fight was gonna be stopped due to punches by JZ, but Aoki also defended and rebounded with a decision win. Good victory by Shinya and now we all can forget about the controversial no contest. But after the fight finally happened, bad news came in again. Aoki is injured and likely won't be able to compete in the quarter finals. JZ won't replace Aoki, because um… he probably has his reasons. Well this is Japan. Even the "smart" MMA fans don't know what's going on in there. It would be very disappointing if both Aoki and Calvancante would be out of the tournament. But let's be optimistic and wish Aoki a speedy recovery!

-Taiei Kin vs. MINOWAMAN~! So Minowaman is gone from the grand prix. I doubt anyone expected him to go far in the tourney, but I hoped that he'll go through Taiei. Oh well, one weirdo out of the tournament, but we still have Dong-Sik Yoon so I've got nothing to complain about!

-Dong-Sik Yoon vs. Shungo Oyama. Yay, this made me happy. I've been a fan of Yoon since I saw his victory against Manhoef. He was 0-4 then and now his record is 4-4. Not too bad! Yoon actually has chances, in my opinion, to win the quarter finals and go on to the semis. The Korean beat Galesic before and now with Kang gone, Yoon's chances are not bad at all. I would laugh so hard if Yoon would actually win the tournament and a new star would be born. Ok I got offtopic, sorry. I haven't seen the fight and it's a shame that it didn't end in a DONGBAR, but anyways, a win is a win.

-Zelg Galesic vs. Magomed Sultanakhmedov. Galesic ended this fight quickly via armbar. All there is to it, I guess. Galesic, like Yoon, is one of the stronger fighters in the Grand Prix, but still far from Top 10 level. Actually I think only the winner of the entire tournament would make it to Top 10 Middleweights.

-Ronaldo Souza vs. Ian Murphy. Souza also ended this one quickly with a submission. As I said past week, Murphy was 0-0 before the fight and had very slim chances to win here. Now let's see if Souza has what it takes to win against tougher competition.

-Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Masakatsu Funaki. Who cares? Why are these two guys in the tournament? Ah yeah, the Japanese people still care about them. I predicted that Tamura will win and indeed he did. Funaki should go back to retirement, please. Kiyoshi is also going out of the tournament in the next round. He never was a great fighter and now he's also past his prime. Souza or Galesic will humble him.

-Gegard Mousasi vs. Denis Kang. Wow, this was a surprise. I predicted Kang to win the whole tournament and boy was I wrong. Actually, right after the fight, I visited SherDog and found an article which previewed DREAM 2. The author said that submissions are Mousasi's weakest point and that it'll be only a matter of time until Kang submits him. I don't know what was wrong with Denis. He started out good, got the takedown, tried to lock in a keylock and then Mousasi got the triangle out of nowhere. The triangle looked to me like a desperate attempt to "do something with his legs" by Gegard and at first Denis wasn't even worried about it, throwing hammer fists. But before Kang realized that he was in danger, it was too late. This was a silly mistake, because I'm sure Denis just didn't expect a triangle, but I give credit to Gegard, of course, for submitting Kang and getting the biggest win of his career. We'll see if he's "4 Real" later in the tournament…

-Kazushi Sakuraba vs. Andrews Nakahara. Saku facing a very dangerous 0-0 opponent <_< I'll give credit to Kazushi here, he looked good, was able to take the fight to the ground and showed that he still has submission skills. But we all know Kazushi is past his prime and it's only a matter of time when he'll get a career ending injury. He'll be out of the tournament in the next round. Or if he faces Tamura or Kin, then he might have chances to go to semis, but his place there certainly would be undeserved.

-Overall thoughts. The middleweight grand prix is going on well. The level of competition here certainly is far from spectacular, but as I said before, the winner will certainly become a Top 10 fighter. Let's hope that in the next round we'll get rid of the aging Japanese fighters and that the best fighters will reach the semi-finals. The finals will be interesting, not sure about the next round, though.

The Ultimate Fighter 7 thoughts



OK, I haven't given my thoughts yet on any of the episodes of TUF7, but I do watch it! And so far no one has crashed the house! (Yes, I complained about that AGAIN, please flame me, thx.) You know what, I really like this season. The ratings are slowly declining and that was expected, but I'm still interested in this show. Rampage is great with his funny comments. Last episode's golden phrase was "I used to go to Anger Management classes, but they used to make me angry!" Pure awesomeness by Quinton. It's quite interesting, that so far, UFC showed more attention to Team Rampage, but Team Forrest is winning the fights. Is that because no one likes winners? Is UFC afraid that members of Team Forrest will become Tim Sylvia? (Ah, I miss The Digimons. Imagine Matt Brown digivolving into Chuck Norris or Jesse into "Big" John McCarthy!). Anyways, it's not interesting seeing one team win all the fights and I hope that next week, Team Rampage will rebound with a victory. Or else, we might see Quinton digivolving into FRUSTRATEDMON. No, I'm not drunk, I just used to watch The Digimons. You have a problem with that?

Talking about last episode's fight, I think Sene won first and second rounds, but lost the overtime. In the third round, Dante finally realized what GnP really means and started to use it. Not effectively, but it helped him to score points and win the match. In the first two rounds, Dante did absolutely no damage and I kind of agree with Rampage here. Some said that the fight was boring, and they're probably right, but for me, it's interesting to watch how teams give instructions to their fighters. You don't hear that in arenas with a crowd. Sene did a good job following instructions, but he just needed to be more aggressive standing up and try to avoid the clinch in the first place. I never really realized what the plan was for Sene in this fight. He's certainly not a BJJ master, he didn't try to takedown Dante and I don't remember him trying to punch. That could be the main reason, why he lost… because he was just bad.

Brown vs. May is next week and I hope May will pull it off. Remember, Brown has a small man complex! Haha, that's some funny stuff.

OTHER NEWS

Affliction loses venue. This is the event that should be headlined by Fedor (27-1 MMA) vs. Tim Sylvia (24-4 MMA). You know, MMA is not an easy business. We saw M-1 Global sign Fedor and then fall apart without organizing a single show. I have to say, that I wouldn't be surprised at all, if this Affliction promotion would cancel all of their plans. Reportedly, they failed to reach a deal with HDNet and without them, the only choice for TV is PPV. Now without TV, without a venue, Affliction really needs to work hard to survive. As an MMA fan, I wish them all the best and I hope we'll get to see Fedor vs. Sylvia sooner or later.

Matt Arroyo returns at TUF7 finale. Matt (3-1 MMA) did a good impression in his performance inside THE HOUSE. He never lost, got injured during practice and decided not to fight in the semis against Danzig. This kid probably has a good future ahead of him. Unfortunately, his opponent is unknown. Perhaps it'll be someone from TUF7 dropping down to the welterweight division…

Leben arrested. Chris Leben (18-4 MMA) is supposed to take Michael Bisping (15-1 MMA). I don't really care why Chris got arrested, but I just hope he makes it to the UFC 85. This arrest certainly will have an affect on his training, but let's hope it won't have an affect on his performance. I wish Leben all the best, and I look forward to his next fight, as I said last week, this has all the tools to be an exciting war.

Diaz to face Inoue at DREAM 3. EliteXC's Nick Diaz (15-7), who had troubles competing in MMA due to some marijuana problems will fight in Japan for the #1 contender's spot for the DREAM Welterweight Championship. His opponent Katsuya Inoue (16-5-3 MMA) is a Pancrase veteran. Good match here and it's really difficult to tell who's gonna win. I don't know much about Inoue, but Diaz has some key victories and some weird losses. Everyone expected him to win against Noons, but he didn't. Everyone expected him to lose against Gomi, but he didn't. I actually expect Diaz to rebound from a loss and win, but that could mean that he's going to lose… right? Also, the winner of the fight is supposed to take Hayato Sakurai (32-8-2 MMA) for the welterweight title, but the sad thing is that Mach lost his last fight this weekend against David Baron. I wonder if that'll have any affect on Sakurai's status as a #1 contender. All I know is that, Sakurai is certainly gone from my Top 10 Welterweight list.

Chuck Liddell wanted to fight despite the injury. You know this is a little funny. No disrespect to Chuck (21-5 MMA), I think he made the right call not to fight. But the funny part is, if you want to fight, then why tell Dana about the injury? Just go in there and fight. He did it before, other fighters do it occasionally. Now imagine Chuck phoning Dana and asking him to come and see him, take a photo of his leg and then Chuck saying "Don't worry, I'm still going to fight, I just invited you here because I wanted you to know how a torn hamstring looks like". So this whole story is quite ridiculous. Who cares if Liddell wanted to fight or not, the fact is that he won't.

BYE BYE!

And that wraps up another edition of The Tuesday Leg Lock report. Thank you for reading and please leave some comments. See you next week everyone!