DREAM.2 Card Adds 1st Bouts

Finally, a sign of life coming out of the DREAM organization as they announced that they have officially added 3 bouts to their upcoming Middleweight GP on April 29th. The confirmed bouts are:

• Denis Kang vs. Gegard Mousasi
• Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Masakatsu Funaki
• Kazushi Sakuraba vs. Andrews Nakahara

The only real bout really seems relevant is the Kang-Mousasi fight. Obviously, that is a great bout with 2 potential GP winners eliminating each other. This definitely offers to be a great fight, especially compared to the other bouts. Kang’s journey to try and repeat his incredible run begins with a tough competitor in Gegard Mousasi, who is definitely one of the early Dark Horses in the GP. Mousasi’s last 2/3 bouts have been fought in Canada at the Hardcore Championship Fighting organization and his last win was at the M-1 Global Slamm show earlier this month.

Even though it’s not too competitive, I am incredibly interested in watching the Tamura-Fuanki fight for the shear fact that every fight Tamura fights against a Popular Japanese Fan Favorite seems to have a good build up. Hopefully, we don’t have a repeat of the disrespect we saw when he fought Hideo Tokoro at Dynamite!! 2007. Tokoro actually slapped him during the staredown and later when Tamura won the fight, Akira Maeda made a scene by shoving the winners trophy into Tamura in a very cold and disrespectful manner.

And there’s Sakuraba. What more can you say? Sakuraba will be fighting a Kyokushin Karate competitor from Brazil named Andrews Nakahara. This is the 25 year old MMA debut. What more do I need say other than hopefully, DREAM can get a better number for this show. I do expect and hope they actually get into the double digits with Funaki, Sakuraba, and Akiyama on the card but we’ll just have to wait and see.