First Competition at Purple!


Yesterday saw a large team from the BJJ LABS hit the mats at the Manchester BJJ Open.

The team had a great day, winning a bunch of medals and a number of great matches. More importantly, it was a huge TEAM-EVENT. We met many old and new friendly faces and were at each other's mats shouting and supporting each other. Ian -our Le Big Boss- was tirelessly there chasing everyone with his camera and keeping the competitors updated with times and brackets. To top it all, we finished the day with a few beers (and many, many more laughs) at Odder Bar on Oxford Road.

I had the pleasure of finally meeting Mr Mark Andrew Bottom (a.k.a. Monkey) from EKBJJ North and his crew. What an awesome bunch of people. I look forward to meeting them soon on their own mats in Rotherham. I also spent some time talking about my dreams of merging Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and live music with top BJJ Purple Belt and NME Music journalist Mr Adam Adshead, chief coach at Factory BJJ.

I quickly want to thank Sam my 14 year old brother for being there all day with me, being my camera man and for laughing at my lame jokes and to Ste for helping with my warm-up roll and for just generally being an all around awesome dude.

I love my crew. I can't wait for the next opportunity to spend this much time with them.

As for my two matches, they didn't have enough in the Masters so I went with the Adults. I followed my strategy and fought really hard for the grips, especially in the first one. My goal was to not pull guard and to not get taken down. So far so good. Unfortunately, once I got the other fighter to pull guard, I took too long inside their guards and lost the first fight by armbar and the second by advantage.

Here are the links to the fight vids on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qifLj93S3y0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kYWfUTappE

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3 comments:

Meerkatsu said...

Well done my friend!

Liam H Wandi said...

Many thanks bro. Hope to run into you soon at one of these events.

Meerkatsu said...

Most certainly. But the thing I have since discovered and now you have, is the scarcity of peers at purple, hence being made to move up or down weights and with the younger age groups.
So my long term view is to target the bigger comps, like British Open or English Open more seriously, and the smaller ones, like maybe the Grapplers Showdown in London, as just a sort of practise (at using my tapping arm) run.
But yeah, defo meet up soon I hope!

take care.
S.