Fighters Only

Issue 021

January 2007

21^st October 2007, Solnahallen, Stockholm, Sweden

By Jakob Sverre Løvstad

The 21^st of October, European Vale Tudo (EVT) put on their seventh show at Solnahallen in Stockholm. The ten fight pro card was preceded by semi pro fights in Cage Challenge 7 (CC7). The best thing about the whole night was the audience, who was largely there from the start of the CC7 card, grew to fill the stands for the start of EVT and sat through the entire card cheering for takedowns, stand-up exchanges, guard passes, submission attempts and what have you. It was truly a pleasure to hear that people understood the game, and wasn’t just there to see someone “get their block knocked off”.

Main event

For those of you with no patience for reading an entire fight report, let me just give you a quick rundown of the main event which saw Alexandre Lima (2-3-0), a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) black belt from the Edson Carvalho Team, face off against Daan Kooiman (7-12-0) from Team Schreiber. The fight lasted all of 47 seconds as Alexandre waited a bit to time his shoot, got Daan to the floor and handily pounded him out for the TKO victory.

Team Schreiber had three fighters on the card who all lost because of inferior grappling skills. If there’s one thing they could benefit from, it’s a BJJ/wrestling coach, as it seemed that there wasn’t even a basic defence being mounted when the fight went to the ground. Not trying to be an ass as the team seemed like nice people, but it’s got to be annoying to just rely on the infamous “puncher’s chance”.

Main card

At the risk of being blamed for self-promotion, the fight of the night was claimed by many to be the first fight of the pro card: Henning Svendsen (2-1-0) of the Trondheim Fight Gym vs. Sergiu Ghilescu (4-2-0) from the Fernando Loio Team. Henning took the fight only the night before, as Sergiu’s original opponent, Navid Yousefi, was unable to compete. The result was a fight where both competitors gave everything, but which Henning dominated with superior takedown skills and good positions and strikes.

Svendsen was only really in trouble at one point where he went for an armbar and got reversed, ending up on the receiving end of some hard strikes from Sergiu. After three rounds of fighting on pure spirit (as he really didn’t show up in shape for three full rounds) Henning was awarded a well-earned victory.

A very odd, but strategically impressive fight, was between Kenneth Rosfort (7-3-0) from Advanced Gym Copenhagen vs. Manuel Garcia (5-4-0) from Total Grappling. Kenneth was just hanging back fending off Manuel’s attempts at turning it into a grappling match. Then all of a sudden, Kenneth puts Manuel on the floor and finishes off with a flurry of strikes from standing in guard. No one saw that one coming.

The decidedly least appreciated match of the evening was a seemingly never ending clinch game between Kristian Hacklou (1-4-0) and Andreas Ahlström (1-0-0) from Stockholm Shoot/BJJ. This was the only match where the audience actually booed, and there was much dispute both at the event and afterwards with regard to who truly won that match, which ended in a split decision win for Kristian.

Round Up

Tchavdar Pavlov (5-2-0, Hilti BJJ) vs. Mikael Taipalus (1-1-0 from Advanced Gym Copenhagen) was over quickly, as Tchavdar was the better grappler and managed to secure the rear naked choke early in the second round. Ake Bergvall (2-1-0, Ceasar Shootfighting) took out Dylan van Kooten (3-2-0, Team Schreiber) easily. Dylan came out trying to press Ake with strikes, but was quickly taken down and pounded out for the TKO victory.

Rafael Silva (4-3-0, Fernando Loio Team) submitted well-known Swedish fighter Kristian Lexell (3-2-0, Stockholm Shootfighting) in an interesting match that saw Kristian dominating from the top on the ground and seemingly having good control of the match. As Kristian was standing in Rafael’s guard to pass or punch, the Fernando Loio team member suddenly turned things around by grapevining the Swede’s leg and getting a tight ankle lock, securing his victory late in the first round.

The fight between Johan Antonsson (3-4-0, Team Yamasaki) and Alberto Pengel (1-2-0, Team Schreiber) was just flat out weird. As Alberto got taken down and dominated with strikes, the referee suddenly stepped in and Johan, thinking he won, gets up and started to celebrate in a big way. But lo and behold, it seems the stoppage was because Johan held Alberto in some kind of rapist’s choke. After some discussion, the fight continued and was stopped a couple of more times for reasons unknown to me before Johan was finally allowed to finish up pounding his opponent for a first round TKO win.

Tor Troeng (2-1-0, RenYi Fight Camp) had a walk in the park in his fight against Fernando Soares (0-2-0 from Fernando Loio Team). Fernando couldn’t mount much of an offence before getting TKO’d by strikes.

Klas Åkesson’s (3-1-0, K3 Fight Team) battle with Martin Wojcik (1-2-0, Team Brasa Sweden) was a grappling match from start to finish. Klas threw a big right when the fight started to get the clinch, and from there he pretty much managed to stay on top of Martin throughout the fight. The fight took much longer than expected largely due to Klas not quite getting a clean position for pounding Martin, and therefore didn’t get in a lot of hard shots, but finally in the third round it seemed Martin had had enough of being dominated and Klas got the win.