Fight 168 – Sylvie Petchrungruang vs Thanonchanok Kaewsamrit

December 23, 2016 – Kawilla Stadium, Chiang Mai – full fight video with commentary above

Oh man, this was a rough one. I fought two days before against Hongpet Liangprasert and had won by TKO, so on my rest day between these two fights I had gone up to the Pettonpung Gym in Mae Rim to clinch a bit with Phetlilaa. She’s wrenched on my neck pretty good and that gave me some nice Gumby neck, but that’s not a huge deal. Happens often enough. But somehow I’d caught a horrid case of food poisoning at dinner on that same night. So from a few hours after dinner on the 22nd and all day on the 23rd, I was pretty much chained to the toilet and lying on the bathroom floor with a bad case of the chills. I just tried to rest all day before the fight, which allows for many hours because we fight pretty late in the evening. I’m rarely in the ring before 10:00 PM, so that’s pretty much a full day of rest. But man… it’s hard to “rest” when you’re unable to hold water down.

So, I went to the venue and was feeling pretty crappy. Pi Daeng could see that I wasn’t well and Kevin filled him in on the situation, so his expectations for me were adjusted. From my end, I just focused on being prepared to vomit or possibly have severe stomach cramps in the ring (or worse, but my stomach and bowels was thoroughly empty by this point), so my attitude was pretty deep in the “fuck it, fuck everything,” realm. Which, incidentally, is a version of what I was aiming for on this trip of fights anyway, Sylvie’s “zero fucks tour 0f 2016.” Albeit, fighting with food poisoning and zero energy is more on the nihilism end of the “zero fucks” scale, rather than being really free because I’ve made a conscious choice to liberate myself from the outcome or whatever psychological baggage I might have weighing me down. But, ultimately I think I fought pretty free, despite the difficulties.

In the fight I let the first two rounds be pretty easy for the World Champ Thanonchanok who was maybe 7 kgs bigger than me for this fight, walking around at 54 kg. When I beat her before I put more pressure on her in round 2, which I think tired her out a little bit and allowed me to kind of build in each round. But I just didn’t have the energy for anything in this fight, so the combination of the adjustments she made in the clinch for this fight and my inability to muster power to overturn her adjustments, made for a very different story line in this fight from the last one. She also added a truly nasty leg-kick into her arsenal, which, if I’d kept with the teeps I’d used in our last fight wouldn’t have been much of an issue, but because I was trying to hop in too slowly and landing too far away, she was able to nail me with full power a good number of times and my leg started turning black within the short time frame of the fight itself. Normally leg kicks don’t score at all, let alone highly, but due to the way I was buckling and flinching away from them, I reckon they had a good impact on the fight and ultimately the score. It was a closer fight than how it felt in my head, but by the last round I really would have to have knocked her down to creep into a lead.

All in all, this was my 2nd fight in 3 days, facing the World Champ giving up 7 kgs maybe, with food poisoning, with a fight scheduled for the next day. Not a bad day at the office.

We had problems with our proper camera, so all we had was the Facebook live stream. Hopefully the added audio makes the video more interesting.

Post Fight Video Update

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