Hereford Open 17/2/13

Sunday 17th Feb. Comp day had come once again. I'd been quite ill in the form of a lung infection and then sinusitis for the preceding month and a half but regardless I  carried on training hard and sparring hard.

On the Sunday morning I was very grateful to have the company of Justin Thomas and Luke Brown for the journey and to cheer me on and offer advice. Neither were competing they just came along to support me so fair play to them. That is a couple of great team mates right there. Especially Luke Brown who had spent the night doing door work in Weston Super Mare, not finishing until 4, then being up and active for 8:30. Good lad.


So we get there at about 9:45 and the place is already very active with Bjj match ups across 4 match squares. The Hereford Competition was, as seems to be the norm for this one, very well organised with the weigh in and match timings being virtually spot on. The guys running this thing have definitely got it down to a fine art.

With my illness and the fact that the festive season was only a month and a half before, the weight cut was particularly gruelling, with me only really getting on course by the last week. So I was very chuffed when my tester weigh in just before the fight came in at 86.6 kg. That's over a kilo under the 88.3 kg limit. Good start. That gave me the chance to blatt back an energy drink and a banana.

By the time we were gathered around our warm up mat I was joined by fellow Checkmat guys, Tom Dalley and Gordon Mills. Also present were a couple of other familiar faces, notably Lee Simpson of Sukata Bjj, a guy who basically wins or at least medals in every competition he enters. And Mark Thomas, the guy who beat me in the first round the last time I entered this comp.

There seemed to be a lot of guys missing from our bracket in the end as a few of the guys were given byes in the first round. I was among the ones lucky enough to get a bye. Tom and Gordon both had first round matches. Both of them unfortunately lost.

When the second round matches were off I had been bracketed with a guy who had already fought. As we were all (or most of us) standing around having a chat and getting to know one another I met my opponent, Wayne Pearey, who seemed like a nice guy. Quite a big guy for the bracket as well and he didn't seemed phased in the slightest by the fact that he'd already fought and won a match.

I'll link the video below for you to see how I did (not particularly well) then explain things as I saw them.

I didn't feel I did too badly from the stand up although he did eventually get the 2 points for taking me down into turtle. He managed to get a couple of good point scoring positions on me (back and side) which, although I was able to escape, I was not explosive enough to get out off within the 3 seconds point scoring threshold. I also escaped a decent arm bar attempt which was a plus point but Wayne was eventually able to trap me in a triangle position, which I had well scouted, but the armbar that followed I did not.
I have to admit that I didn't really feel like I had any significant input in this bout. Wayne basically had me on the back foot all the way through.


For my repechage fight I was put against Daniel Lewis, who'd had a tough first match up against Lee Simpson. I was a little bit more confident for this one as Daniel really did look knackered after his first and I'd had a lot of recovery time. This confidence was misplaced however as Daniel was a pretty damn awesome competitor.

First thing I noticed from the initial grip fight was holy shit was this guy strong. In the first contact he managed to grab my arm and force it where he wanted it and I had to struggle massively to get it moved. After that he pulled guard on me and it was about the only bit of top control I had in the fight. He quickly swept me and controlled me for the duration of the fight, the only meaningful thing I did was escape side control momentarily. Eventually he managed to take my back - a position I'm normally quite comfortable in - and slapped on a game winning Bow and Arrow choke.
My most productive moment in the entire thing was when I tried to steal his victory at the end by raising my own hand. I pretended this was a joke but to be honest I was so spaced out I didn't really know what I was doing for a few seconds.
I had a good chat with Daniel after the bout and he seemed like a really nice guy. If I was being critical of the comp in any way I'd say he was probably easily the second best guy in our bracket but as he'd lost to Simpson, the most he could get was the bronze, which he did. Ironically the repechage final for bronze was between Wayne and Daniel so both my opponents did well. Lee Simpson quite easily took the gold however after winning four straight fights. His opponent, Mark Thomas, who'd mysteriously managed to get to the final after only having one match? I suppose that's the advantage of being one of the home team fighters :o|


So that was my Hereford Open experience for this time round. The highlight of this comp for me was the fact that one of my oldest childhood friends, Lee Bonella, who happens to live about 25 miles from Hereford, came up to watch. It was great seeing Lee but I'm gutted I couldn't win one for him.

I've now got to go away and analyse what went wrong and what I can do to improve my game. I'll do this in another blog entry I think as I haven't done a proper analysis of my game's strong and weak points for a while.

I'd like to thank my Instructor, Ian, for training me, my good team mates Dan Foster, Chris Cook and Luke Brown for the hard sparring sessions on the run up to the comp and Chico Mendes for cornering me at the comp.

I'll finish with this as I think it's awesome.

¬m/