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The rise of top Featherweight Marlon Sandro
By Zach Arnold | June 24, 2010
This is the passage from Jordan Breen’s radio show last Tuesday that I really wanted to talk about.
“He started his career looking like really another Nova Uniao position-based grappler and has turned into having smoking punching skills. In his last four victories, Marlon Sandro has knocked out: Nick Denis, Yuji Hoshino, Tomonari Kanomata, and now Masanori Kanehara. Those four wins have taken him a combined 3 minutes and 38 seconds. 2 minutes and 33 seconds of that were the Yuji Hoshino win. And not only is he knocking these guys out, these guys are all ending up on spine boards and stretchers and needing to be scraped off the canvas. It’s a freaky level of natural electricity coming out of this man’s fists. And so it does seem a bit weird to think that a guy who had a big string of decisions would be able to be you know capable of that kind of thing. The things I would single out are first of all, the level of striking he had at the time, his boxing still isn’t super great but he’s really nice at setting up his right uppercut and that’s the punch that’s really hammering home these guys. That’s really the straw that stirs the drink for his nasty and brutal knockouts. So, when you get a little bit more boxing acumen you’re really able to choose the shots that fit you well and you can land with accuracy and with potency and that’s a bit what he has here. On top of that, his ground game, which is what he was more comfortable with in his earlier career being a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, being a Nova Uniao guy, he’s more concerned with passing than pounding first. He prefers to get position before he does anything. And really, even if you look at a more recent fight where he fought a bit on the ground… the m.o. was to pass guard first. He wasn’t really that interested in pounding. So a lot of his fights where he racked up decisions, he was positionally taking out these guys. I don’t know if that will change now, I don’t know if he kind of realizes the gift that he’s been given and will get takedowns and just pounce on a guy’s head. But there are a few times even in the Shooto Brazil days where he opened up a bit on the ground and was able to seriously hurt guys, clobbering them on the floor. But more often than not, he preferred to get to a dominant position and look to grapple, didn’t really have a good mix of the pound and pass. So, I would say that’s the biggest distinction. As he good as he got a bit of stand-up technique, he was more willing to use it and was able to set up bigger power punches and on the ground he just doesn’t prefer punching. He prefers to pass and go for submissions that way. But it will be interesting to see if he goes back to the ground game in subsequent fights if we will get a ground ‘n pound performance, I imagine he would still show off some serious, scary-type Howitzer power should be opt to do that.”
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, StrikeForce, Zach Arnold | 6 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
I will admit that while the guy’s an absolute machine, I was skeptical of his performances before the Kanehara fight.
Kanehara has been in there with some big names recently and either got wins or had very close fights. Marlon Sandro almost knocked his head of his body.
The guy’s got unreal power and the winner of him and Hioki is easily top 5 if not top 3 IMHO.
BTW are they scheduled to fight yet?
I eagerly await 45 Huddle talking about how everybody in Japan is overhyped.
LOL. I fully expected the first comment to be from 45 Huddle saying “so what, Japan is overrated and success there means nothing”.
Bunch of haters.
Heavyweight to Lightweight in Japan is still overrated by many hardcore fans. And I stand by that opinion.
The Featherweights and Bantamweights seem to be on par still in Japan….
Let’s see how he does in WEC.
I’ve hit heavybags that have better defense than Kanehara.
[…] WEC, but their 145 lbs knowledge expansion should include what’s happening in Japan, where Marlon Sandro continues to take his stock value to a new high, where he recently knocked out Masenori Kanehara at […]