Febricio Werdum Talks About Grand Prix And Fighting Overeem

Added on Jan 10, 2011 by John Petit in

UFC & MMA

Febricio Werdum has finally broken his silence about the upcoming Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix. Werdum spoke with Brazilian magazine Tatame, and spoke about his thoughts and chances in the tournament.

Werdum has made comments in the press and on twitter about “working on his bang(striking),” and talking about healing from being hurt most of 2010. He said he isn’t happy with the rematch of Werdum, but promises that he has been working smart to beat him. He said “Now I’m training a lot my bang but it still isn’t good for me to bang with Overeem. The guy has just won K-1, so I’ll try to go for the ground, even because he was training his bang a lot and he didn’t have enough time to improve his ground game for this fight with me. I’ll catch him again, you can bet on it. I’ll beat him with my game plan and smartness. I wouldn’t like to give Overeem this rematch, I’m just fighting because the event matched this fight. To Fedor I’ll give this rematch happily, because I like him and he deserves this rematch. But first I have to think about how I’ll beat Overeem so that rematch can happen.”

Werdum feels as though they might be setting up Overeem up with a loss, and this would make for a huge payday for Strikeforce. Werdum will probably be the underdog going into the fight, so I’m not sure where he is coming from, but he explained how he felt. He commented “I believe they did it that way so that they can sell many pay-per-view subscriptions on the semifinals and on the finale. They’re betting I’ll beat Overeem and that Fedor beats Bigfoot, because they know everybody wants that rematch. So, they want to guarantee a good semifinal so that they sell it out and they’re betting on it. Who doesn’t want to watch a rematch like this one?”

When asked how he sees the other side of the bracket playing out, Werdum was quite candid. He said “Kharitonov wins (in the semis), because he’ll go for it the entire time. Arlovski is good when he’s attacking, but when he’s attacked he backs up and I bet the Russian will beat him. On the bout between Barnett and Rogers I’m 100 percent Barnett because once he put Rogers on the ground, he’ll turn him into a turtle .”

Strikeforce / M-1 Global: Fedor vs. Silva is set to go down February 12th, 2011 at The Izod Center in East Rutherford, New Jersey. These will have the first round of matches for the Grand Prix. As of right now the card looks like this.

Heavyweight Grand Prix quarterfinal bout: Fedor Emelianenko vs. Antonio Silva

Heavyweight Grand Prix quarterfinal bout: Andrei Arlovski vs. Sergei Kharitonov

(unconfirmed)

Heavyweight Grand Prix reserve bout: Shane Del Rosario vs Lavar Johnson

Heavyweight Grand Prix reserve bout: Ray Sefo vs. Valentijn Overeem