Sunday, July 31, 2016

Big Bad Blog Video Theater-Karolina Kowalkiewicz vs Rose Namajunas

Here's the match video of Karolina Kowalkiewicz vs Rose Namajunas from last night's UFC show in Atlanta. The winner of this match gets a shot at Joanna Jedrzejczyk's UFC Strawweight Championship. The big mistake Rose made is she seemed content to counterpunch with Karolina. I would have never expected her to utilize that strategy. She needed to be more aggressive because she played right into Karolina's usual strategy. So nothing much happened in round one. There was just a lot of dancing around. I expected that from Karolina because she always fights like that. But that's not how Rose usually fights. So round one could have been scored 9-9. But judges don't usually score tie rounds. With that in mind, Rose marginally won round one 10-9. I also thought round two was much closer than people think. Though Karolina was effective with knees in the clinch, Rose scored with some significant strikes. So I scored it a 10-10 tie. But the tide had turned and Rose had lost steam. I can't say why Rose fought like that but that's why she lost. Karolina clearly won round three. So if one were to score the fight as a whole the way it was done in PRIDE, Karolina won the fight. But here fights are scored by the round. And that's why the fight was much closer than the perception I saw on Twitter last night. The first two rounds were close enough that Rose could have got the decision. So the split decision win for Karolina didn't surprise me. But I didn't think she won the fight. I thought Rose lost the fight. She beat herself with terrible strategy. Karolina get the title shot. But something tells me she will need to do more than she did in this fight to beat Joanna. Enjoy the video!

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