polyh3dron
Banned
In the USA: LIVE on HDNet - 12/31/10 - 4am Eastern/1am Pacific
In Japan: LIVE on TBS
DREAM Welterweight Championship Bout
Mariusz Zaromskis vs Kazushi Sakuraba
DREAM Featherweight Championship Bout
Bibiano Fernandes vs Hiroyuki Takaya
DREAM Interim Heavyweight Championship Bout
Alistair Overeem vs Todd Duffee
Non-Title MMA Bouts
Tatsuya Kawajiri vs Josh Thomson
Caol Uno vs Kazuyuki Miyata
Hayato "Mach" Sakurai vs Jason High
Sergei Kharitonov vs Tatsuya Mizuno
Hiroshi Izumi vs Ikuhisa "Minowaman" Minowa
Satoshi Ishii vs Jerome Le Banner
Hideo Tokoro vs Kazushisa Watanabe
Katsuaki Furuki vs. Andy Ologun
K-1 and MMA Alternating Round Matchup
Shinya Aoki vs Yuichiro "Jienotsu" Nagashima
K-1 Bouts
Gegard Mousasi vs Kyotaro
Tetsuya Yamato vs Akiyo "Wicky" Nishiura
IGF special rules
Shinichi Suzukawa vs Bob Sapp
New Year's Eve is coming up and once again we have a huge Japanese MMA/K-1 event being put on by FEG to ring in the new year. FEG was flying by the seat of their pants trying to put this one together, the fight card wasn't announced until a week and a half ago or so and until recently they didn't even know if it was going to be shown on network TV in Japan. This time they've enlisted Japanese Pro Wrestling legend Antonio Inoki as the face of the event in an attempt to pull in some more casual viewers/sponsors etc and given the amount of time they had to set up these fights it's not a bad lineup at all.
No official fight order has been announced yet and some fights may still be added before the day of the event. I will update the OP accordingly.
The K-1 matches will be under K-1 kickboxing rules (standup fighting, no strikes from a two handed clinch), the IGF Special Rules bout is reportedly Pancrase-style with only open-palm striking allowed and it may be a scripted pro-wrestling style thing since the fight is produced by Inoki, and the K-1/MMA mixed rules bout will have 4 alternating rounds of K-1 and MMA rules.
K-1 Match - Gegard Mousasi vs. Kyotaro
We most recently saw K-1 Heavyweight Champ Kyotaro get completely tooled by 2009 World GP Champ Semmy Schilt in the opening round of the K-1 World GP 2010 Final a few weeks ago, but make no mistake; Kyotaro has devastating KO power as you can see here against Peter Aerts. Kyotaro also has notable wins over Musashi, Melvin Manhoef and Gokhan Saki.
This will be the 2nd K-1 match for Mousasi, having beaten the aforementioned Musashi at Dynamite!! 2008 where he was considered an underdog. Gegard is going up against a much younger fighter this time however who has yet to reach his prime. This will be an interesting fight for both guys and I'm hyped for it. It's one of the more competitive fights of the night.
Mixed Rules Bout - Shinya Aoki vs Yuichiro Nagashima
If the rules are going to be like they were with the Jerome Le Banner/Bob Sapp Mixed Rules fight, then the first round will be K-1, the 2nd will be MMA and then the 3rd and 4th will alternate from there. Shinya Aoki's striking is not all that great. He gets guys on the ground and makes them tap, that's how he wins his MMA fights. Nagashima, OTOH, won the K-1 MAX Japan Grand Prix by KOing Hiroki Nakajima and knows a thing or two about striking. Oh yeah and he likes to cross dress. The thing is, while this will be Aoki's first time fighting under K-1 rules, Nagashima actually has some MMA experience under his belt having won a lightweight tournament in Japan back in '06 so while his grappling skill will be nowhere near Aoki's, he's not going in blind a la James Toney.
Realistically though, if Aoki can ride out the initial storm in the K-1 round, he shouldn't have much of a problem subbing Nagashima. It'll be really interesting to see what Aoki's strategy will be in the first round though. Will we see him throwing some actual kicks and punches with something behind them or will he just clinch up as much as possible and run the clock? I'll take Aoki by sub because I think Aoki will be elusive enough in the first to avoid being KO'd.
MMA Bout - Jerome Le Banner vs Satoshi Ishii
Satoshi Ishii is a 2008 Olympic Judo Gold Medalist and is a national hero in Japan as a result, basically the new Hidehiko Yoshida. He immediately announced his wish to become a mixed martial artist after winning the gold medal and then was being courted by all of the major MMA organizations at the time; DREAM, Sengoku and even the UFC. He was very close to signing with the UFC and was shown in the crowd with his name on screen during a UFC PPV event along with lots of photo ops with him and Dana White. He was training at many of the well known American camps like American Top Team and Xtreme Couture. Ishii ultimately ended up making the boneheaded move of signing with Sengoku after jerking everyone around for a while. When he initially announced his interest in MMA he actually challenged Fedor Emilianenko, but ended up fighting fellow Judo Gold Medalist, the aforementioned and then-on-the-verge-of-retirement Hidehiko Yoshida at Dynamite!! 2009 and failed miserably. In 2010, Ishii fought in some smaller regional shows to get a couple wins under his belt, got disqualified for continuing to punch an opponent after the ref called the fight and then won a couple fights in DREAM against Minowaman and Katsuyori Shibata.
Ishii's toughest opponents to date have all been grapplers and he has yet to face a fighter with elite striking, until now. Jerome Le Banner is mainly a veteran K-1 fighter with victories over some of the best in the sport, but also has a record of 3-1-1 in MMA, with his last 3 MMA fights all being KO victories, one of which was over another Japanese Judoka, now-UFC fighter Yoshihiro Akiyama.
JLB is most likely in the twilight of his career but is still dangerous, and Ishii is still in the relative infancy of his professional fighting career and has been beaten by an aging vet before. The main question mark in this fight is how much has Ishii has improved in the past year. I see JLB winning this one either by decision or knockout.
MMA Bout - Hayato "Mach" Sakurai vs. Jason High
This is an interesting matchup. Jason High was a participant in the DREAM 2009 Welterweight GP and made it all the way to the final before getting his head kicked into oblivion by Marius Zaromskis. Sakurai also competed in the same tournament but didn't meet Jason since his head met the same fate in the semi final earlier that night.
Since then, Jason High, a protege of UFC fighter Antonio McKee, signed with the UFC. He dropped a decision to a tough opponent in Charlie Brenneman, got cut from the UFC right after and then rebounded with 2 wins in some regional shows. A win over Sakurai would be exactly the jumpstart he needs in his career and would probably get him right back in the UFC.
Hayato Sakurai went on to lose his next 2 fights after the GP to very tough opponents. He lost to Akihiro Gono in last year's Dynamite!! by armbar, and then in the main event of DREAM.14 was submitted yet again by Strikeforce Welterweight Champ Nick Diaz via armbar. At 35 years of age he is most likely towards the end of his MMA career, and a loss to Jason High would probably make that end come sooner rather than later.
MMA Bout - Tatsuya "Crusher" Kawajiri vs. Josh Thomson
Kawajiri is a fighter that Former Strikeforce Lightweight Champion Josh Thomson has wanted to fight for a VERY long time. For any veteran fighter in the upper echelon of their weight class outside of the UFC, it is always difficult to find new challenges. Thomson wasn't planning on facing such a challenge on 3 weeks notice however. When he got the call for the fight, he was at a Golden State Warriors game, drinking beer, eating some chicken wings and was caught off guard. He declined the offer at first and only reconsidered after a pep talk from his American Kickboxing Academy teammate, UFC welterweight Josh Koscheck and as a result began the shortest training camp he has ever had for a fight. Thomson is coming off a hotly debated and controversial unanimous decision victory over Gesias "JZ" Cavalcante and is 10-1 in his last 11 fights with his sole loss at the hands of current Strikeforce Champ Gibert Melendez, whom he had beaten prior to that. A decisive win over Kawajiri could definitely earn him a rubber match against Melendez back home with a chance to regain the Strikeforce Lightweight title.
Tatsuya "Crusher" Kawajiri comes into this match off of a devastating submission loss to DREAM Lightweight Champion Shinya Aoki at DREAM.15 last July in a match that had been anticpated in Japan for a very long time. He is now 7-3 in his last 10 fights with his only other losses coming from Eddie Alvarez (which was close) and a very controversial decision against Gilbert Melendez that many thought he won at Yarrenoka, the PRIDE farewell event on NYE in '07. Kawajiri is one of the most exciting lightweight fighters to come from Japan and his fight with Alvarez was widely considered to be the fight of the year in 2008. His Sean Sherk-esque wrestleboxing style should make for another barnburner of a fight against Thomson who can also be a brawler at times, but is also a danger on the ground with multiple submission victories. Many MMA websites had already decided their 2010 Fight Of The Year before the Henderson vs. Pettis fight in the WEC and ended up having to edit their pieces. This fight has the potential to make the same people do a bit more editing.
DREAM Interim Heavyweight Championship Match - Alistair Overeem vs. Todd Duffee
Just 3 weeks ago, Alistair Overeem became the first MMA fighter to simultaneously hold major world titles in MMA and K-1 Kickboxing when he won the K-1 World Grand Prix in Tokyo. For those of you who are unfamiliar with K-1 (which is run by the same company as DREAM), their World Grand Prix is considered the Super Bowl of striking, so this achievement is HUGE for Overeem. I was about to go a bit further on Overeem, but this very well done piece on him just went up on Sherdog, of all places and it's a great read not only on him, but on MMA in Japan (which they call "kakutougi") and Japanese culture in general.
Todd Duffee is credited with one of the quickest knockouts in UFC history when he made his UFC debut against Tim Hague (I forget if Penn's KO of Matt Hughes beat it or not). In his next fight at UFC 114 last May, he had the misfortune of encountering Mike Russow, the Homer Simpson of MMA. Rather than going into detail describing the fight, I'll just leave this here. After this loss, the UFC tried to book a couple different fights for Duffee, and he unfortunately couldn't do them due to injury. During this time, Todd got into a bitter twitter battle with the UFC complaining about not getting paid enough and about the way he was getting promoted which ultimately ended up with him getting cut from the promotion. After turning down a last minute replacement fight against Strikeforce HW contender Antonio "Bigfoot" Silva (where he would have replaced Alistair's brother, coincidentally) at the beginning of the month he went for the (relatively) big money and has agreed to a fight with the Strikeforce HW Champ, and K-1 World GP 2010 Champ on a week's notice. Not only that, he actually seeked this fight out when he knew DREAM was looking for an opponent.
In my opinion, this will be the toughest opponent that Alistair has faced in MMA competition since he fought Mirko Cro Cop in September 2008. I think Brett Rogers (whom Overeem manhandled and destroyed) had an inflated ranking due to the Fedor Effect (anyone who faces Fedor sees a rise in their ranking) and exploiting the weak chin of Andrei Arlovski. Of course Dana White will write the fight off either way, that either "big fucking deal, ALISTARR beat a guy who souldn't cut it in the UFC" or "lol ALISTARR got beat by a guy who couldn't cut it in the UFC" but a decisive, destructive victory over Duffee would silence some doubters saying that The Reem's success in K-1 has nothing to do with MMA and he's still the same guy who got subbed by Werdum and Arona; and KTFO'd twice by Shogun, once by Liddell and once by Kharitonov.
A win for Duffee, on the other hand, would shock the MMA world and would be bad for Japanese MMA in particular which is slowly starting to make a resurgence. Strikeforce's Heavyweight Title would become even more meaningless and everything Overeem has worked so hard for up to this point would be for naught. It could very well happen too. Alistair had better not underestimate Todd Duffee, and I don't think he will.
More to come...
watched a good portion live last year and plan to do the same this go around.
