THE CANADIAN PRESS
Croatian Goran Reljic is fighting on his home continent at UFC 122 but Canadian light-heavyweight Krzysztof (The Polish Experiment) Soszynski expects some cheers of his own when the two meet Saturday.
Watch UFC 122 live at 3 p.m. ET on Sportsnet One.
“Only my immediate family left Poland to move to Canada — my mum, my dad, my brother and I,” said Soszynski, before listing off a string of relatives back in the old country.
The Canadian fighter is fluent in Polish and the UFC has already started marketing him to Polish media.
“MMA’s growing really big in Poland right now,” he said.
Soszynski (20-11-1) is coming off a second-round TKO loss at UFC 116 to Stephan Bonnar. The Canadian beat Bonnar the fight before at UFC 110, when a cut sidelined the American in the third round.
The most recent bout earned both men a US$75,000 bonus for fight of the night.
Soszynski texted UFC matchmaker Joe Silva once he had recovered from the fight to let him know he was ready. And he mentioned an interest in going to Germany, because of its proximity to Poland.
“He liked the idea and here we are,” Soszynski said.
Reljic (6-3) needs a win after back-to-back losses to Kendall Grove and C.B. Dollaway.
“That’s what’s going to makes him so dangerous, that he is desperate,” Soszynski said of the Croat, who is moving up from middleweight.
Soszynski says he learned a valuable lesson from the second Bonnar fight after his opponent told him later: “He basically told me I had him beat in the first round. I just let him back into the fight.”
Bonnar told him there was about 45 seconds in that first round where he didn’t know where he was.
Soszynski says his mistake was to try to take Bonnar down to the ground after hurting him.
“I should have just kept going with my strikes,” he said.
The fight turned in the second round after Bonnar nailed him with a knee.
“For the first time ever, it felt like my whole body went numb for about two, three seconds and then everything was blurry up until he stopped punching me,” Soszynski said.
“He didn’t let me recover. I let him recover and that’s what happened,” he added.
—
English lightweight Andre Winner will be the villain Saturday when he takes on German veteran Dennis Siver.
Winner, however, is just happy to be fighting again after a disappointing decision loss to Nik Lentz at UFC 118 that saw the American glued to his leg in search of a takedown for most of the fight.
“A bit of a boring fight,” he said. “Very boring.”
He was also disappointed in his own performance — calling his “cage craft” pretty poor — despite the fact that Lentz looked the worse for wear at the final bell.
“I literally got hit twice,” said Winner (12-4-1). “And I don’t even think they were clean shots.”
On the plus side, Winner defended a lot of Lentz’s takedowns.
More than two months later, the loss still rankles.
“The taste is still there. I can still feel it. It’s got me fired up for this fight. Yeah, I’ve got a little pent-up aggression.”
At five foot 11, Winner will have a four-inch height advantage over Siver (16-7). The English fighter has prepared for this bout with new Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach Victor Estima.
Winner, meanwhile, revealed that he was suffering from food poisoning when he took on fellow Brit Ross (The Real Deal) Pearson in the finale to Season 9 of “The Ultimate Fighter.”
“At the same time, I take nothing away from Ross,” Winner said of his training partner and friend. “He’s a great competitor and he got the victory. It was a really close fight, it could have gone either way. I still get people to this day tell me that they thought I won it.
“But Ross definitely deserves the praise he gets, for all the hard work that he puts in.”
—
Veteran light-heavyweight Vladimir Matyushenko looks to bounce back from a loss to Jon (Bones) Jones when he takes on stocky submission ace Alexandre (Cacareco) Ferreira.
The Brazilian replaces the injured Jason Brilz, who is known more for his wrestling.
“He’s a really great submission guy,” Matyushenko said. “He does a few things and he does them pretty well. I have to watch out for those.”
Ferreira (18-6) has 17 submission wins.
Matyushenko (24-5) lasted one minute 52 seconds against Jones, who stopped him by TKO after getting him to the ground in their Fight Night main event on Aug. 1.
“I was a little bit too slow and he was fast enough to finish me,” said the 39-year-old Matyushenko.
“He definitely can be a UFC champ.”
Matyushenko welcomed the chance to get right back into the cage.
“I was training for months and months and then the fight goes a minute and something. So it’s kind of hard to show your skills and what you’ve got. An opportunity like this to fight right after that, I think it’s great.
“You want to see the results of your training. You spend hours and hours a day, day after day, and you don’t see results, you get frustrated a little bit.”
—
All fighters made weight Friday at the Konig Pilsener Arena in Oberhausen, Germany, with headliner Nate Marquardt hitting the scale at 186 and opponent Yushin Okami on the 185-pound number. Soszynski (206) was also one pound heavier than Reljic.
