Cage Warriors 181 Run down
By Ryan Mullen
Cage Warriors 181 was a fantastic night of fights. The audience nearly blew the roof off of Vertu Motors Arena in Newcastle. It was headlined by hometown hero Harry Hardwick and Brazilian wrecking ball Keweny Lopes in a bout that was promised to be a firefight. Alongside him on the main card were exciting young fighters such as fan-favourite Kennedy Freeman and Scottish standout Sean Clancy Jr.
Accidental foul stops Joyner’s streak.
Team Fish Tank (TFT)’s Charles Joyner’s three fight win streak was brought to a sour halt in his bout with the veteran Yannick Bahati. The six foot eight Aussie came out early looking exactly as he did in prior fights. Switching stances, managing the distance behind an educated jab, denying the wrestling attempts and landing excellent chip-away shots to the body and leg.
Joyner has proved he knows how to fight tall incredibly well and demonstrated that all throughout the fight until a tiny mistake in the third round. While Joyner probed the distance, Bahati pressured forward at the same time resulting in an accidental eye poke. Despite Joyner’s nigh-flawless performance, the fight was brought to a stop due to an inability to continue from Bahati and was called a draw.
Clancy Jr. continues to astound.
Higher Level MMA’s Sean Clancy Jr. faced off against Brazil’s Andrey Augusto in a performance expected of an up-and-coming prospect. The Glaswegian fought well. Chipping away at Augusto’s base with calf kicks, dominating the grappling exchanges with crafty sweeps to get out of disadvantageous positions. Clancy Jr. demonstrated good striking as well, finishing the fight with a body-shot that buckled the Brazilian, following up with a head kick while he was on the way down as insurance.
His performance was an excellent one.Showing a masterful display of pressure, striking and grappling. Augusto had two notable moments of success- a checked kick and a successful takedown -yet neither affected the fight
Power cements number one contender status.
Quite fittingly, all of James Power’s victories have ended in a TKO or KO stoppage. Though Power trains in Atherton Submission Wrestling he seems to favour getting his fights to the ground via a knockdown instead of a takedown. Dumitru Girlean is no slouch either, prior to this fight he’d never been knocked out before and in the fight prior he submitted the veteran Chris Bungard in front of a home crowd.
Power’s repeated head kicks had Girlean wobbling midway through the second round. After
a desperate takedown attempt from the Italian was stuffed, Power hauled him to his feet and sent him back to the canvas with a perfectly-placed elbow.
Despite awaiting a call back to the UFC, it looks that Lightweight Champion George Hardwick has a new contender on his hands.
Burlo’s grit prevails.
Justin Burlinson’s triumphant return after a cancer battle was nearly halted by Sweden’s Theodore Berggren. “Burlo” ate vicious shot after vicious shot and there were moments that he seemed to be out on his feet. Yet even though the shots kept raining down, even though the fight was all but lost, Burlo held fast.
The second round was a different tale from the first. Burlo came out of his corner ready to brawl. He turned an athletic competition into a real fight, wobbling Berggren with vicious strikes and going after him with fight-ending intentions. Though he never got the stoppage on the feet, Burlo got the Swede on the ground midway through the third round and submitted him via a head-and-arm choke.
Freeman lives up to the legacy.
Kennedy Freeman hoisted the Women’s Bantamweight belt over her head as she extended her perfect record to 6-0 after beating Mafalda Carmona. It’s a tough task to live up to the legend that is Ian “the Machine” Freeman, yet with her perfect record, entertaining fights and three fight KO-streak “the Machine 2.0” has proved that she’s more than up for the task of handling it.
Freeman and Carmona started out trading shots, but the longer the fight went on, the less Carmona returned fire and the better Freeman did. It was an excellent fight and certainly one worthy of a title.
Hardwick calls his shot.
Cage Warriors Featherweight Champion Harry “Houdini” Hardwick made a statement when he stopped his toughest test yet in Nova Uniao’s Keweny Lopes. “Leão” has been a wrecking machine on the American regional scene. His career had a slow start with one loss and one draw but quickly picked up momentum from there. He went on a tear, winning eleven fights in a row, eight of which by knockout.
While the fight got off to a rocky start, the fight went exactly to Hardwick’s plan. In an interview a month out from his fight with Lopes, Hardwick said: “I think I’ll get him desperate to get the fight finished. He’ll start trying to kill me with every shot and that mistake will snowball into him getting tired and hittable, then he’ll get fed up, fall over and I’ll win.”
In the first round Lopes had Hardwick pinned against the Cage and ripped vicious shots to the body, but he was visibly tired after the first. Hardwick’s superior cardio, crafty, exhausting
ground game and the damage he piled up over time led to Lopes fading as the fight went into championship rounds, where Hardwick dropped him with a straight, damaged him further with knees and caused the referee to stop the fight when it was clear Lopes would not fight back.
After such a dominant performance against a test so tough, Hardwick practically demanded a UFC contract. In an interview with Edith Labelle he said: “Tell me I’m not one of the best fighters in the world. Tell me that now. Tell me I don’t deserve to be on the biggest stage. I have just won 10-8 rounds against and stopped a guy from Nova Uniao, a guy on an eleven fight winning streak and I have just stopped him, I’ve 10-8’d him, I battered him and I stopped him.”
With UFC London coming up early next year, hopes are high that “Houdini” will be under the brightest lights possible fighting in the biggest MMA promotion in the world.