Corey Anderson has detailed the struggles he had following his no contest then loss to Vadim Nemkov but is very ready for his third shot at the title against Karl Moore in Belfast at Bellator 302.
The Light Heavyweights will meet on Friday night (March 22), in the main event slot of the promotion’s inaugural Bellator Champions Series which features a plethora of well known faces from the Bellator roster.
Anderson came within seconds of claiming the Light Heavyweight title against Vadim Nemkov at Bellator 277 but an accidental clash of heads ultimately led to the bout being ruled a no contest. After initially taking the loss relatively well, the constant interview requests and recounting the tale took its toll on Anderson, who then started to find the loss difficult to deal with and led to some challenging times for the Rockton native. He said:
“After the Vadim Nemkov fight, I went to a different, darker place, I guess you can say in a way the first fight because the way it ended, the accidental headbutt. When they told me I won this fight the belt, they started to bring the cheque in and we started celebrating and then I jump of the cage, and then ‘Hold on, Mr. Anderson, correction. 3 seconds left on the clock. You can’t win until the time is all the way out. And so, like, I literally put me in like, a sunken place, but at the same time was like, I was okay with it. I went home with the family. I was like, it’s whatever, it is what it is, can’t cry over spilt milk. But then over time, with all the interviews, the phones blew up for like four or five days straight.
“Like, I couldn't keep a battery charged. Everybody wanted to do an interview and telling the same story over and over and over. You know, I got to a point where I start snapping off of my wife lashing off on my kids. It started to actually affect me like made me very sad that I was that close and it was taken because of an accidental headbutt.”
To escape from it all for a short time, Anderson took himself away to one of his properties to recollect his thoughts and reset his mind before feeling ready to get back to pursuing his goals. He added:
“We got to get back to the real world and start training again. Get ready for the next one. That was probably a very, very dark spot. That is probably one of the deepest spots I've been in my career, darkest spots I have had in my career.”
His rematch with Nemkov didn’t not play out the way Anderson had hoped. Entering the contest with a host of injuries, ‘Overtime’ openly admits that because of this he did not prepare adequately for the bout. The problems for Anderson started early in the fight, when he simply could not find a way to take the bout to the floor and he could feel Nemkov starting to run away with the fight, implementing his game a lot easier than he was able to in the first.
Back now with a another shot at the belt, and although Anderson will definitely be made to feel like the away fighter by the Belfast crowd, he feels extremely well prepared and more than ready for anything that Moore is going to bring.
“… I've learned a lot about Karl Moore and I think I got him pretty figured out. Like, I know what type of fighter if I come out with so much pressure, I know exactly what's going to do. If I try to say lackadaisical, I know what he's going to do. So I feel like I have a pretty good grasp and I'm going to say I'm 100% confident and I know everything. But I got a pretty good understanding from watching his past fights from his earlier career in Cage Warriors to his last fight in Bellator. He kind of have some things that he does the same and each one and I just put that together and think about moulding my game plan and what I'm going to do to make him make the wrong chess move. I see this fight ending, Corey Anderson getting his hand raised and getting that long awaited belt he has been waiting for his whole career.”
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