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The much-awaited trilogy battle between Aung La Nsang and Vitaly Bigdash has been confirmed by ONE Championship CEO Chatri Sityodtong. The two former middleweight champions are set to clash this coming February at the Singapore Indoor Stadium.
The last time they fought in the ONE circle was way back in January 2017. Bigdash lost the rematch with Nsang via unanimous decision.
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Since then, Nsang has reigned supreme in the middleweight division and even went up to get another belt at light heavyweight in ONE Championship. 'The Burmese Phyton' reigned for more than 1,200 days at middleweight before losing to Reinier de Ridder. He later lost his second belt to the same fighter.
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Meanwhile, Bigdash followed up his loss to Nsang with another knockout defeat at the hands of Leandro Ataides. He was able to bounce back with a submission win over Yuki Niimura in December 2018 but has since been out of commission for a couple of years due to injury.
With both fighters healthy and coming off victories, ONE Championship CEO Chatri Sityodtong sees it as logical to bring them into the cage for the third time:
"Vitaly has a string of injuries in the past couple of years and that’s what sidelined him but he says he’s healthy and he’s ready to take on Aung La," said Sityodtong That’s another fight we’ve been trying to make for a while but again Vitaly has been injured or has had multiple injuries but now he’s 100% healthy."
ONE Championship plays it safe when booking 12 bouts per show
ONE: Heavy Hitters was supposed to have a stacked card of 12 fights but some matches had to be canceled due to fighters contracting COVID-19.
With seven fighters having to sit out the event, the fight card was trimmed down to just eight fights. Moving forward, Sityodtong will make adjustments to book more fights and, if anything happens, ONE Championship will still carry a dozen matches per event:
"What we are doing now for every single event just because of what happened in this event, we had originally 12 fights scheduled and four got knocked out because of Covid related reasons, we are actually going to be increasing the number of bouts per event by 30 or 40% for every single show so that if there are dropouts, we can still end up at 12," said Sityodtong.
Watch Chatri Sityodtong's full post-event interview below:
