Badr Hari faces Arkadiusz Wrzosek this Saturday, September 4 in the headliner of GLORY 78. Kickboxing event airs live on pay-per-view from Rotterdam Ahoy in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The heavyweight bout features Dutch-Moroccan star up against a fairly unknown competitor from Poland. So what fight result do we expect to see?
Badr Hari needs no introduction. ‘Who is Arkadiusz Wrzosek’ has likely been a question for quite sometime since the fight was initially announced in April.
Let’s take a look at the tale of the tape, starting with the fight record. According to the fighter profiles on GLORY website, Hari’s record is 106-15-0, 92 KO, while Wrzosek’s 12-5-0, 7 KO. While this of course might be incomplete, the advantage in experience is obviously in favor of Hari.
Hari fought almost all A-listers of the great era of K-1 in Japan, including Semmy Schilt, Peter Aerts, Remy Bonjasky, Alistair Overeem (the list goes on), as well as the current generation of kickboxing, such as Rico Verhoeven.
The biggest or, let’s say, somewhat known names Wrzosek faced are perhaps be Benjamin Adegbuyi, Colin George, Tomas Mozny. So the question here is how nervous and/or stressed, or as they say in CIS countries “burnt”, Wrzosek will be right before he enters the ring and faces Hari.
Badr Hari is 36. Arkadiusz Wrzosek is 29. The “Bad Boy” has been fighting since early 2000s, perhaps late 90s. Polish fighter reportedly started competing mid 2010s. So the quite unfortunate thing here is that longer the sports career goes on, more injuries get accumulated. In this particular sport people get punched and kicked, so yeah, there is a bit of damage for sure.
In case of Badr Hari we’ve seen what happened in his previous fight against Adegbuyi late last year and before that against Verhoeven in December 2019.
With seven-year age different, while some people don’t even fight for that long, and given how “used” one’s engine and core might be from fighting for over 20 years, the advantage here likely goes in favor of a younger and fresher competitor.
‘A victory without danger is a triumph without glory,’ Pierre Corneille
Now the question is ‘who has to lose more’.
For Badr Hari the win is a must. While he has no problem of going up against anyone, including the current top rated fighters, losing against an unknown fighter, who can hardly be called “a rising star” (no disrespect of course) will be unacceptable, especially for himself (no judging of course).
For Arkadiusz Wrzosek winning against “The Golden Boy of Kickboxing” could catapult his name and lead to more big fights. Losing against Badr Hari, especially when you have had under 20 pro fights to date, and when you have hardly previously faced anyone of such caliber (except perhaps Adegbuyi), will not likely do much damage.
This of course depends on how the fight goes. As a fact, a beautiful competitive fight that you might lose is sometime much better than an ‘ugly’ or easy win.
Finally, let’s get to the actual fight, which is scheduled for three rounds. Judging by two most recent fights of Badr Hari he is most dangerous during the first two rounds. After that it’s either stamina, injuries or anything else or all together, and the outcome we know already. No questions asked, he has knockout power and can put anyone to sleep at any moment.
In the fight against Adgebuyi, Arkadiusz Wrzosek seemed to not have enough power to neither properly take and defend what his opponent was throwing, nor to hurt him back. Unless there is a threat that we don’t know about (or just didn’t see) the only way he appears to be able to defeat Hari is to exhaust him and try to outpoint, and definitely to not get tagged.
GLORY 78: Badr vs Wrzosek fight card, how to watch, PPV cost, time
Important thing is to never judge an upcoming fight by the result of the previous one. Every fight is different.
And yes, as they say “anything can happen in a fight”, which we know already.
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