Douglas “Phenom” Lima will have to defend his title in front of a massive crowd in one of the most illustrious venue’s of the sport at Bellator 180. This is the 29 year olds second run as champion and this is the going to be his first test to hold onto the championship. His contender is no slouch, if Lima wants to carry on as champion then he first has to deal with the brute strength and strike force of none other than Lorenz Larkin. To make things even harder for the Phenow, Larkin is coming into this fight hot! The last four of his five fights have been comfortable wins and on the sole occasion that he did lose, it turned out to be via a rather speculative split decision. This loss came at the hands of Albert Tumenov and a lot of people are still of the opinion that the judges got this one wrong.
Larkin is an underrated fighter who on paper is actually surprisingly good with a win ratio of 75%. A good 11 of his 18 victories have come via knockouts. However, Lima’s numbers are even better. Lima has a win ratio of 82% and has got a fair number of knockouts under his belt too. However, the one area where Lima does have the edge is certainly on the ground. He is really good at Jiu-Jitsu and has 11 submissions to his name. Having said that, it is no doubt that Lima will be trying to get the fight to the mat as often as possible, but Larkin has a great reach and is going to be expecting take downs. If there is a hard fight to call in this fight card, it is probably this one. If we HAD TO pick a winner, then we would thing Lima will take this by unanimous decision.
Author : Rory McGregor
