It’s a big night for MMA in Central Alberta on Friday, as two shows will go down in Edmonton and a third scheduled event in Calgary with the Hard Knocks show.
I’ll be at the TFC show at the Shaw Conference Centre cornering three guys. I’ve got two of my own fighting there — Josh Machan faces Mitch Clarke for the Canadian lightweight title, and his brother Ryan Machan takes on James McCutcheon in his first fight as a welterweight. And some of my trainer Josh Russell’s guys are fighting on the Calgary card, so I’ll be cornering one of his as well because he has to be in Calgary. O’Denva Phillips had to pull out of his fight against Darcy Boizard, so Josh’s fighter Max Dalsin took the fight at the last minute.
It’s a shame that the TFC and MFC shows are on the same night. Obviously MFC was originally supposed to be in Brandon, Manitoba, but they decided to move it back to Edmonton. You’d think (MFC president) Mark Pavelich would change the date considering he was the one coming into the city after the fact. But he instead decided to make the shows go head-to-head.
Pavelich’s show will also air live on HDNet, which is good thing for them, but will that actually hurt them because people will have the option to record the show and watch it later and thus choose to attend the TFC show live? Of course, the MFC is saying it will be a sellout anyway but the River Cree only holds at most 1,200 people.
Obviously with my fighters at the TFC event, I’ll be there and I’ll be PVRing the MFC event, which is the beauty of technology. I’ll be interested in watching Ryan Ford back in the MFC and against a tougher opponent than who he’d been facing lately in TFC. Lima looks like he’s definitely a step up in competition.
I’m not so interested in the Antonio McKee title fight, and I’m not sure that it would sell out with that as the headliner. McKee is not exactly an exciting fighter, though he has said he promises to bring it in this one. That’s some strong words, especially coming from a guy who has fought to a decision for like his last 25 fights!
Mckee’s bold statements, that if he doesn’t finish his opponent Luciano Azevedo he’ll retire, does bring some curiosity to the fight. I’m interested now just to see if he’ll really bring it. But I read Azevedo is a bit of a decision fighter himself. It will be interesting to see if they’ll play it safe and drag it out for 25 minutes or actually bring it. Which will be refreshing considering recent talk from guys like Dan Hardy saying the sport has gotten boring with too much wrestling and Cole Miller suggesting fighters are fighting to survive rather than win.
Back to my guys fighting in the TFC show. Josh is fighting for a belt and that’s exciting for him. It will be a challenging five rounds. Anytime you’re fighting five five-minute rounds, it’s interesting but it can get long. He’s been training real hard, as hard as I’ve seen him train since being with me. And he’s on a heck of a win streak. He’s won seven fights in a row, three of which coming in my show. Josh got off to a rocky start, losing his first three fights but he’s really turned his career around.
He’s got a tough fight Friday with a big strong wrestler in Mitch Clarke. It’s kind of a catch-22. You’ve got a wrestler who’s going to want to take you down and you don’t want to be there against a tough wrestler. But Josh has gotten a lot of submissions off his back, so hopefully if he does get taken down, he can get one. I don’t think this will be a standup fight. I see this being a ground fight.
I don’t really know the guy Ryan is fighting. I know that he showed up an hour late to the weigh-ins. But then Machan missed weight by 0.8 of a pound. I had to work Thursday, so I wasn’t at the weigh-ins, but all I know is that he weighed himself on the scale here that I use and he was on weight. And then I found out that when he got to Edmonton, he was over the limit on the scale at the official weigh-ins.
It’s his first fight at 170 after cutting to 155 before, so he only had to cut four pounds this time. I didn’t even spend time in the sauna with him; I didn’t think it was necessary. I don’t really know what to say.
As far as the matchup goes, I think Ryan has more experience and didn’t have to cut as much weight as he has needed to in the past, so this should be much better for him.
In the main event Victor Valimaki takes on Martin Desilets and hopes to get the belt back from the man who took it. I didn’t see their first fight, so I don’t really know what to expect from them. Obviously I know Valimaki and from everything I’ve seen from Desilets, he looks to be a banger so I expect they’re going to be throwing some heavy leather. I expect a big KO or TKO.
Finally, my first week of heavy training is in the books and my foot held up pretty good. I trained Monday, Tuesday and Thursday pretty hard, and my leg is no more sore than it has been in past weeks. I didn’t do a ton of kickboxing and to be honest, that’s where I have the apprehension, in planting the foot really hard and throwing a kick just like when the injury happened.
In the next few weeks, I’ll do some more kickboxing. But so far, so good. I just saw Duane Ludwig signed on to take another fight, and his injury was very similar and presumably required a similar recovery. If he could do it, so can I.
(Editor’s note: this blog originally listed Rio Wells as the fighter who had to pull out of his fight against Chuck Pelc and was replaced by Matt Dobson, rather than Max Dalsin. This was incorrect. We apologize for the error.)