Paul Daley and Nate were expected to headline the BAMMA 8 fight card on Dec. 10 at The Capital FM Arena in Nottingham, England, but the process of putting the fight together took too long. Daley plans to sit out the rest of the 2011 following his Oct. 21 bout with Luigi Fioravanti in the Canadian Ringside MMA promotion.
“I would have liked to have fought on BAMMA 8. We tried hard to make it happen,” Daley recently told MMAWeekly Radio. “It’s 100-percent not going to happen. Even if we were waiting on getting the go-ahead, my focus has shifted to just sitting out the rest of the year.”
The fight with Fioravanti will be Daley’s fifth in 2011 and sixth in the last calendar year, and he’s looking forward to some time off.
“This will be 100-percent my last fight of the year,” he said. But the British welterweight is disappointed that he isn’t going to get to face Marquardt in December in his hometown.
“I got up for it. It’s a huge fight for myself. It’s a huge fight my hometown as well. I started planning camp. We planned out how we were going to train and how we were going to split everything up. This would have been one of the most intense and hard-focused training camps I would have had,” said Daley.
“Because there was so much indecisiveness just trying to make the fight happen, it just sort of lost steam with myself and then the other people involved trying to make the fight happen. The process was just too long to keep a sort of motivation going into it.”
Daley is optimistic the match-up with Marquardt can happen sometime in 2012 and hopes it can be for the BAMMA title.
“It’s a fight that can still happen, so hopefully next year, depending on where I’m at and how things work out, it can be a fight we can do next year, hopefully here in the U.K.,” he said.
“I want to fight for the belt and Nate is the biggest fight there in BAMMA. I’m 2-0 in BAMMA now, and I’d like to have the belt. The belts look really good. The show is getting bigger, so it would mean a lot to win the BAMMA belt and even more to win it from Nate Marquardt,” added Daley. “We’ll see what happens.”
Daley will have to wait and see what Strikeforce has in store for him in 2012. He is still under a Strikeforce contract.
“We still talk to Strikeforce. I still have fights left with Strikeforce, and that’s pretty much as much as we know,” said Daley. “Obviously, we have to speak with Strikeforce to get the go-ahead for all these non-Strikeforce fights that I take. My contract was non-exclusive. Pretty much set up in the same way that (Alistair) Overeem’s was, so I’m free to fight in other shows as long as there are no plans for Strikeforce to use me on a show that might conflict with that.”
He’s appreciative of Strikeforce’s cooperation in allowing him to take fights outside of the organization.
“The cool thing is they allow me to fight elsewhere. They haven’t been really difficult to deal with,” stated Daley. “It’s been really cool to work with the Strikeforce people and the people at Showtime. We’ll just see what happens after this fight at Ringside MMA as to what is going to happen with my contract.”
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