In a very interesting match that was overshadowed by the open-weight finals, Brazilian Top Team’s Ricardo Arona (Pictures) faced “The Demolition Man” Alistair Overeem (Pictures). This was an important bout as the winner would likely move up to face Wanderlei Silva (Pictures) for the PRIDE middleweight title.
At first it seemed like Overeem had suffered damage to his eye from the blows, forcing a premature tap. But in his post-fight press conference, the Dutch fighter said that he suffered a freak injury from the Arona low kick that sent him to the mat. After this he couldn’t mount any kind of offensive and couldn’t escape the strikes Arona was throwing at him, leaving him no other option but to tap.
DSE really threw DEEP and Cage Rage veteran Cyrille “The Snake” Diabate into the deep end by placing him against 2005 Middleweight Grand Prix Champion Mauricio Rua (Pictures). This was Shogun’s first appearance back since his nasty elbow injury against Mark Coleman (Pictures) last February.
Diabate circled and tried to use his reach advantage. Despite being taken down several times, the Frenchman was able to work his way back to his feet, but the beginning of the end started when Shogun scored the mount.
After coming to his feet as Diabate attempted to escape from the bottom, the Chute Boxe fighter started to connect with stomps and soccer kicks. Eventually the referee had seen enough and called an end to the bout at 5:29 of the first round.
What looked like a pretty decent fight on paper turned out to be very boring, as judo practitioner Kazuhiro Nakamura (Pictures) squared off against Japanese wrestling champion Yoshihiro Nakao (Pictures).
This bout saw bout fighters pausing a lot between seemingly random attacks. Neither fighter put together any decent combinations and both were admonished several times by the referee for a lack of action.
There were very few takedown attempts and not once did this fight go to the ground. The crowd let the fighters know that they were unhappy by the pace of the fight by booing loudly. This very slow and uninteresting fight went the distance and Nakamura took the unanimous decision.
Evangelista Santos (Pictures) connected with a good flurry of punches in the corner against former WBF cruiserweight champion Yosuke Nishijima (Pictures) and followed with a takedown. From here he moved to side-control and then to the mount. As Nishijima bridged to escape, Santos took his back and sank in a rear-naked choke for the victory at 3:24 of the first round.
Korean Ssirium practitioner Lee Tae Hyun didn’t look all that great in his MMA debut. After a lot of clinching and sloppy boxing with Ricardo Morais (Pictures), both fighters looked totally gassed. Eventually Hyun’s corner stopped the fight at the 8:08 mark of the first, giving Morais the TKO victory.