Big Bad Blog Video Theater-Julia Budd vs Marloes Coenen

Here's the match video of Julia Budd vs Marloes Coenen from last night's Bellator show in Oklahoma. This was for the Bellator Women's Welterweight Championship. This fight has been in the works for a couple of years delayed by injuries. I don't know why Bellator president Scott Coker didn't do this match two years ago. I guess he wanted to build up to it. But first Marloes got injured. The fight was scheduled for May 2016 but Julia pulled out due to injury. Alexis Dufresne replaced her and submitted Marloes. And that loss highlighted Marloes major flaw especially as she has gotten older. As great as Marloes has been over the years, she has a bad habit of underestimating opponents. That's why she has had several upset losses. The writers covering the Bellator show even asked her about underestimating Julia. There's no question that Marloes is a more complete fighter than Julia. Julia is mainly a kickboxer and she hasn't shown much of a ground game in the past. But she's always in top condition and she's very strong. She won't run out of gas. And her strength advantage turned out to be the key to the fight. Julia took Marloes down in round one. As we all know, Marloes is very good at submissions from bottom position. So though Julia was able to stay on top, she did nothing with it and she was almost submitted a couple of times. It was a very close round that could have been scored a tie. Between rounds, Julia's husband and trainer Lance Gibson encouraged Julia to keep taking Marloes down and be more aggressive in top position. It became clear that Julia was much stronger than Marloes and Marloes could not stuff takedowns. Maybe she thought Julia would stick to kickboxing. So Julia controls the second and third rounds. And in round four she gets a mount and her ground and pound led to the TKO stoppage. Congratulations to Julia Budd for winning the Bellator Women's Welterweight Championship. I'm not sure who is supposed to challenge her for the belt. Most of the 145lb fighters I have seen in Bellator aren't very good. Immediately after the fight, Marloes Coenen announced her retirement. Though the announcement was a surprise, it didn't really surprise me. Marloes doesn't seem like she would want to hang around if she's not competitive. There are plenty of fighters who don't know when to quit. Marloes' legacy is as a pioneer of women's MMA especially in Japan when at age 18, she won the 2000 World Remix tournament in Tokyo. And of course she was also the Strikeforce Women's Bantamweight Champion. Should she have stayed at Bantamweight? She only went down to 135 because Coker asked her to do it. But she didn't like cutting that much weight so she went back to Welterweight. At least she knows it's time to go. On behalf of MMA fans worldwide, thank you Marloes Coenen for a legendary career. Enjoy the video!