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Gokhan Saki is, without a doubt, one of the best Heavyweight Kickboxers in the world, who is able to piece together amazing combinations that have floored some of the best in the world. With that being said, last night Rico Verhoeven went into his fight against Saki with a perfect game plan that was able to nullify Saki's strengths. I've spoken with a lot of fans and read a lot of reactions and I seem to be seeing a lot of "bad reffing" and "Saki got screwed" talk floating around, when in fact, Saki was not screwed at all.
A careful viewing of the fight will show that Rico controlled the first and third rounds and was able to nullify most of Saki's offense while landing the cleaner strikes. Jack Slack is always a great resource when it comes to breaking down technical stuff, which always makes me happy as I used to have to do that, but having dudes like him around means that I can focus on other things. Check out his pretty great breakdown of the fight, although I do have one small qualm; GLORY has a flash knockdown rule, which states that if a strike has the force to put a fighter down, it is ruled a knockdown. Rico's punch might have missed, but the kick before it landed and put Saki onto the math, which meant it was a flash knockdown.
Niin no, lyönti osui päähän ja Saki kaatui. Ne on aina tilanteita, joissa tuomari joutuu tekemään päätöksen saman tien ja katsoen yleensä eri kuvakulmasta kuin mitä TV-kuva näyttää. Jos ei halua luvunlaskuja niin ei kannata kaatuilla lyöntien jälkeen, koska siinä on aina riski että tuomari katsoo sen lattiaanlyönniksi.
Itse olisin ilman luvunlaskuakin laittanut erät 1 ja 3 Verhoevenille ja hänet voittamaan matsin.
So we've been doing some serious waiting on GLORY 11's ratings and they are finally in. What the numbers are telling us is that Kickboxing still has to develop an audience here in America, but there was a really solid start to this over the weekend at GLORY 11. In a few places I've gone on record saying that I felt that 200,000 - 400,000 were my expectations and that 500,000 would be a huge win for GLORY. Not everyone agreed with that, but the final numbers are in and they look to be exactly where they should be.
The average rating for GLORY 11 was 381,000 viewers, with the peak being 781,000 viewers. It should be noted that the peak came within the first quarter, which was most likely due to the lead-in from Spike's previous programming, which is Cops. Cops, somehow, draws over 1.5 million viewers in 2013 and it is safe to say that not all of these Cops viewers were Rico Verhoeven fans. Considering that this was GLORY's largest platform within the US to date and the first time that Kickboxing has seen a major audience in this long, consider this a solid first step.
The card featured primarily European fighters (with an Australian) whose prior exposure in the United States was only to the most hardcore of hardcore fans. It is actually admirable that they were able to pull in these kind or ratings with their core product and not by bringing in former UFC fighters to compete.