Even Herring, with nearly 60 professional fights, was surprised at the game plan of Kongo, who seemed to be primed for a striking war.
“It actually took me towards the end of the first round to even figure out what was happening at that time,” said Herring in an interview with MMAWeekly Radio. “I had trained pretty much exclusively for a stand-up fight and we were in the middle of a wrestling match. It was pretty shocking.”
Kongo’s strategy made Herring dig deep to find new ways to win the fight and he complimented the game plan, but says that his own power at the beginning of the first round may have played into the ground attack also.
“I think maybe a lot of it had to do to with the fact that we landed that straight right early on and it might have just kind of taken the wind out of him,” he stated.
In both the second and third rounds, Herring was able to take side control on Kongo and began reigning down knee strikes to the body, but the Texas native admitted after the fight that he wished he had a different set of rules while working in that position.
“The crowd seemed to get really, really excited when I would raise that one knee above his head, and I was kind of playing to the crowd a little bit on that,” he admitted. “I’m really missing those Pride rules. It would have been awesome to finish that fight in the second round with knees to the head.”
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