Martin Nguyen recently earned a brown belt in BJJ. The former ONE Championship featherweight and lightweight champion thinks there would be no better way to commemorate the occasion than by securing a submission in his upcoming fight.
He faces Ilya Freymanov at ONE on Prime Video 2 next Saturday. Nguyen has a reputation for being a one punch KO artist but is looking to show another side to his game in Singapore next week,
“I recently got my BJJ brown belt, so if it hits the ground, I’m not sure if he wants to be with me on the floor. I’ll make him look like a fish out of water. That’s for sure,” he told ONEFC.com.
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Overhand right
Nguyen is not known for his wrestling. You can’t land an overhand right if your opponent is already on his back and that is the punch that has become the Australian’s trademark.
But his opponent comes from a kickboxing background and Nguyen feels like this might be the perfect fight in which to showcase his wrestling,
“Styles make fights, so we’ll see what happens. I’m going to come in there, I might bang, I might come in there with my wrestling. I don’t know.”
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Stand and bang
Nguyen’s opponent will be competing on a ONE Championship card for the first time and he admits to not knowing ‘anything’ about the Russian,
“I don’t know anything about him. He trains with a very good friend of mine Rafael Fiziev, a top-level kickboxer and I assume, just going off the words of my coaches and a few videos that I’ve seen, that he’s a top-level kickboxer as well, so I’m just going to be sharp on the day.”
But for all the talk of takedowns and submissions Nguyen will always be a ‘stand and bang’ type of fighter. He has has tremendous success with this strategy as well as a few setbacks and has provided plenty of entertainment along the way.
So it would be a surprise if he came into a fight with a more cautious, wrestling based approach and it sounds like the former champion is ready to stand and bang with the Russian kickboxer,
“But yeah, we’ve got to start on the feet no matter what. It works in his favour as a kickboxer so we’ll put him to the test.”
