Megumi Fujii on Dec. 31 DREAM show

Tony Loiseleur of Sherdog reported today that Megumi Fujii will appear on the big New Year's Eve DREAM show. I'm not surprised as when the show was announced, Megumi expressed interest in appearing on the show. Unfortunately, due to some recent surgery, Yuka Tsuji is not available. And a lot of the Japanese fighters will be on the year end JEWELS show. So her opponent will be Spanish fighter Karla Benitez. Her record is 6-1 and her last fight was a loss to Finnish fighter Katia Kankaanpaa on the Oct. 10 Cage 16 show in Finland. Karla was a Muay Thai fighter before turning to MMA in 2007. I had heard of her but I hadn't seen her before. So I wanted to evaluate her and I thought you might want to see her too. In Europe, Muay Thai is still more popular than MMA so sometimes it can be difficult to find MMA fighters who aren't converted Muay Thai fighters. Karla's latest match isn't online but her match previous to that is. So that's the video I have for you. It's Karla Benitez vs British fighter Simona Soukupova from the Aug. 19 HDH show in Spain. The fight is basically three rounds of kickboxing. There isn't even one takedown attempt. I understand why Karla would want to do that because that's her specialty. But when Karla was clearly winning the first two rounds, I don't understand why Simona wouldn't take her down and take her out of her comfort zone. I always say if a fighter's strategy isn't working, change it. And so many fighters lose a unanimous decision when they don't do that. So check outthe fight for yourself. Karla normally fights at 125 but I think this fight was at 115. This upcoming fight hasn't been announced in Japan yet so I don't know the contracted weight.