Saturday 14 September 2013 – Palma Arena in Majorca on 14 September, on the card at the K-1 World MAX Final 16 event.

The fight in Chad‘s own words…

My opponent on the night was Christofer Mena, although I was originally supposed to be taking on Fran Palenzuela, a tall, orthodox Thai boxing style fighter. The change was a last minute one – Mena was a shorter, stockier southpaw fighter who was concentrating more on his boxing.

The fight started with a good competitive first round – I think it was a close one, either me just edging it or maybe a draw – I don’t think he won it. I’d started off slowly but, although I thought the round was mine, I wasn’t as dominant as I normally am. My performance was good but there was a lot to work on…

We believe we won the second round convincingly but I still wasn’t being ‘2 Slick’ all the time and was still getting caught a few times.

But at that point we still thought we were winning the fight. In the third round, everything was going to plan and then it was like a double knockdown. I went to throw a jumping knee, he hit me at the same time and obviously, having both feet off the floor, I couldn’t keep myself up. I went down but jumped up straightaway; the ref gave me an 8 count and as he did so, Mena was on the floor at the same time. This gave him time to recover; I thought this was a bit controversial but at the end of the day, when you’re fighting out of your country, sometimes this sort of thing happens.

No excuses at all – Mena was a good fighter but I do believe that he wouldn’t have stood a chance against us on a good day and I’d love to get back in the ring with him.

He won on a points decision, mainly due to the knockdown in the last round – obviously that meant the round was scored 10-8 and, even if you win the other two rounds, you can only get a draw. So it was quite clear at the end of the fight that they were going to score it towards him.

After the fight, I was absolutely gutted and very disappointed with myself and my performance. But we’ll be straight back in the gym, ready to improve on that. We’ve discovered what went wrong, we’re going to try and iron out those creases in training towards the next one and I can’t wait to get back in there.