Cage Warrior’s matchmaker did a great job in booking Swede Martin Akhtar versus Finn Toni “Dynamite” Tauru, both are known to excite the fans in their scraps. Akhtar’s strengths are primarily with his outstanding thaiboxing, but has shown throughout his MMA career that he can take on, and win against excellent grapplers. Hear from the Swede about fight preparation below.

Interview

First off, tell us a little about how you got the contract with Cage Warriors and how do you feel for you debut in the organisation.
I was contacted by Tue who is the coordinater for Cage Warriors in Scandinavia, and he asked if I was interested in fighting, and I don’t say no to a fight. It’s always fun to fight so I will do my best to entertain the crowd once again.

How have your training been for this fight?
Before this fight was offered to me I had already bought a trip to Thailand for vacation, and it was scheduled so I got home 2 1/2 week before the fight, so the trip had to be combined training and vacation. So in other words, the preparation for this fight have not been ideal, but with the routines of the coaches on Malmö Muay Thai and MMA -Malik Mawlayi, Larry Lindwall, Rasmus Svensson and Mariuz Denderski, I think we’ve made a great camp out of it.

You seem to fight a lot of ground specialists, why is that do you think?
I have no idea why that is. It’s MMA so you’ll have to know a little of everything and be prepared for most. I don’t choose my opponents, I just take whatever fight is given to me.

Every time we see you in the cage you have improved your grappling, how prepared are you for Tauru’s ground game?
I feel great, so we’ll see how the fight goes.

You will be fighting pretty close to home, do you think you’ll have home crowd advantage on fight night?
It’s always extra fun when you have a lot of fans and support when you fight, and of course it can give you a little extra boost but in the end it’s about how you and your team performs that matters.

Stay tuned to MMAViking.com for live play-by-play, video interviews, and pictures of the March 22nd debut of Cage Warriors in the Nordics.