Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Two women's matches added to May 6 RIZIN show

RIZIN held a press conference today to announce several matches for their May 6 show at Marine Messe in Fukuoka. They announced two women's matches. The good news is one of the matches features Atomweight champ Kanna Asakura. The bad news is her opponent is clearly inadequate. Typical Japanese promoters. "Let's bring over a fighter no one has heard of but she fought fighters you heard of." That's called matchmaking by osmosis. Her name is Melissa Karagianis. She is 30 years old from Toronto. She trains at 6IX MMA on Queen St. W. in the Parkdale area in the west end. She's 3-3. All of her fights have been for King Of The Cage and she has beaten Andy Nguyen twice. Well, Andy has fought for RIZIN. That's how they pitched this at the press conference. Like I said, typical nonsense from Japanese promoters. I don't expect Kanna to have any trouble with her. It's a timewaster but I guess they want to keep Kanna active. In a Strawweight bout, Kanako Murata will face Weili Zhang who is the number one female fighter in China. That might sound good but her promotion Kunlun has fed her low level Brazilians lately. Her record is 16-1. But the competition level is very low. She's beaten fighters like Emi Fujino, Karla Benitez and most recently Bianca Sattlemeyer. If she can beat Kanako, maybe she has something. It should be more competitive than Kanako's recent wins over Yukari Nabe and Claire Fryer. It's just that when a fighter has been as heavily protected as Weili, who knows if she's any good.

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