ABU DHABI // How do you like your mixed martial arts (MMA) fights? Do you prefer them short, not necessarily sweet but explosive? Or would you rather they went the distance, both fighters slugging it out but still standing and leaving it to the judges to separate them?
Fight connoisseurs in Abu Dhabi would have found no reason to complain last night, witnesses as they were to plenty of each kind of fight, as Abu Dhabi Warriors Fighting Championship returned for a fourth, successful event.
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The crowd was not especially large – a weeknight had something to do with that – but a dedicated and knowledgeable one. Six of the 10 fights they saw on the card did not last the distance of three five-minute rounds; five of those ended in the very first round. If that suggests a certain unevenness in the quality of the match-ups, it did not mean any let-up in the action.
The shortest among them, disappointingly, was the heavyweight main event between Paul Buentello and Eric Prindle. It lasted just over a minute. Prindle moved in to kick, ponderously so but Buentello sidestepped and took him down with a simple but hard right. There was no chance Prindle was getting up from that.
The most explosive was French-Algerian Tahar Hadbi’s first-round takedown of the Japanese Yoichiro Sato in the welterweight (77kgs) division.
Two-and-a-half minutes into the first round, the popular Hadbi tapped Sato with a left, opening him up to finish him off with a brutal right that knocked him clean out; whether or not it was broken, Sato’s nose did not leave the Ipic Arena in the same position it had arrived.
A similarly swift end was the fate of the UAE’s Ahmad Al Darmaki in his featherweight (66kgs) fight against Ukraine’s Artiyom Gorodynets. In the build-up Al Darmaki had revenge on his mind, having lost last year to Gorodynets.
Popular as his entry was, it was not to be for Al Darmaki. He came out blazing, a flurry of roundhouse rights and swings and briefly, it looked as if he might catch Gorodynets off guard.
The exuberance did Al Darmaki in, however, as Gorodynets found an opening to knock him down with a left and then really went to work on him.
Soon he was all over Al Darmaki as he curled up in defence, pummeling him with strikes on the back of the head. Just over two minutes in, the referee had no choice but to stop the fight.
RESULTS
• Pavel Gordeev (Rus) beat Jason Santana (USA) by unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 29-28
• Diego Gonzalez (Swe) beat Carlos Moyano (Col) by tap-out, 2nd round
• Tahar Hadbi (Alg/Fra) beat Yoichiro Sato (Jap) by technical knockout, 1st round
• Artiyom Gorodynets (Ukr) beat Ahmed al Darmaki (UAE) by technical knockout, 1st round
• Alexey Polpudnikov (Rus) beat Antonio Magno Lima Perera (Bra) by technical knockout, 1st round
• Andreas Michailidis (Greece) beat Ion Pascu (Rom) by unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 29-28)
• Joachim Christensen (Den) beat Anthony Ruiz (USA) by tap-out, 1st round
• Akop Stepanyan (Armenia) beat Will Chope (USA) by a split decision (29-28, 28-29, 29-28)
• Alexander Sarnavskiy (Rus) beat Jorge Patino (US) by a unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 29-28)
• Paul Buentello (USA) beat Eric Prindle (USA) by knockout, 1st round
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