The great plague of injuries haunting
UFC 108 certainly hasn’t spared the evening’s undercard.
A planned bout between
Steve Cantwell and
Vladimir Matyushenko was scrapped altogether this week, and a fine bit of matchmaking involving
Martin Kampmann and
Rory Markham fell by the wayside when
Jacob Volkmann was called in on short notice to replace an injured Markham.
Nonetheless, fight-starved fans the world over get a free SpikeTV telecast of select preliminary bouts and the pay-per-views have been especially generous of late in delivering on dark matches. So read on and learn all about Denmark’s version of “The Hitman,”
Cole Miller’s affinity for mutated turtles schooled in Ninja and the usual brew of fight talk and fight snark.
Following a disheartening decision loss to
Paulo Thiago in his UFC debut, Volkmann is back on his grind and his newest challenge comes on short notice against Kampmann. If Volkmann is serious about extending his UFC career, he needs to get Kampmann horizontal ASAP, as his misadventures on the feet nearly got him knocked out in his bout with Thiago.
Therein lies the rub, though. Volkmann’s supposedly dominant wrestling looked like anything but in the Thiago match, and his positioning skills seemed too rudimentary to keep up with his obvious talent for submissions. While most know Kampmann for his studied kickboxing, his Brazilian jiu-jitsu skills have been his saving grace in the Octagon several times over. That sort of multifaceted ability is exactly what Volkmann struggled with against Thiago, and he’s running into it all over again.
Kampmann is nowhere near as physically explosive as Volkmann, and most of his submission scalps have come from top control. As long as Volkmann can overpower “The Hitman” sufficiently to bull him down, there is a good chance he could grind out a W by way of conservative ground-and-pound. That’s the kind of restrained strategy that often eludes young fighters accustomed to running their opponents over, but it’s a mentality that Volkmann will need to win this fight.
The talent is there for Volkmann to succeed under the UFC banner. He still needs some seasoning, however, and his physical ability is restrained by the fact that he is something of a tweener weight-wise. Those disadvantages will hamper him against Kampmann, who should work out a solid decision win by using accurate strikes and surprising wrestling to frustrate Volkmann for the full 15 minutes.
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