RENA is the RISE QUEEN Champion

Erika Kamimura and RENA exchange punches

At today's RISE show at Tokyo Dome City Hall (formerly JCB Hall), RENA and Erika Kamimura faced each other for the RISE QUEEN Championship, the first women's title in the RISE kickboxing company. Erika has been on a roll lately. But there was a sign of trouble yesterday when she missed weight. She made weight on the second pass but whenever a fighter misses weight, I always have a nagging feeling that it's a sign of bigger problems. The problem with RENA is she is wildly inconsistent. You don't know which RENA will show up. Will it be the RENA that won the 2009 & 2010 SHOOT BOXING S-Girls Cup. Or will it be the RENA who lost to Ai Takahashi in May and contemplated retirement. Or even worse the RENA that gave a wretched performance against Jessica Penne in Sept. RENA normally trains at the Oikawa Gym in Osaka. But for this fight, she moved to Tokyo and trained with SHOOT BOXING owner Takeshi Caesar. In order to neutralize Erika, she needed to use kicks and jabs to keep Erika off her. She was successful enough that Erika wasn't able to tee off on her like she has to others lately. It was a close match but it appears that over aggressive reffing may have been the determining factor in the match. Obviously I'll wait until the match video turns up so I can evaluate it. But in kickboxing, you need to know the difference between clinching and holding. In round two, Erika was given a yellow card for holding. And in round three, both fighters were given yellow cards for holding. So if Erika gets one more yellow card, she is disqualified. You can't tell me that doesn't affect a fighter. So were the yellow cards legit or was the ref treating clinching as holding? The scoring was 46-45, 47-46 and 48-46 in RENA's favour. So if the penalties were unwarranted, then the match was either a majority draw or possibly a split decision either way. It is never a good thing when point deductions determine a fight. I've seen it in Japan before and bad reffing is the usual culprit. Afterwards, RENA said this was a great result to a bad year. She said beating Erika was more important to her than winning the belt. But I think we can expect a rematch in the near future.