The Team Misfits Australasia Qualifier for the Craig Jones Invitational (CJI) 2 is starting on May 10th, 2025 and the full lineup has just been confirmed. The tournament is being put together by the team’s head coach, Lachlan Giles, and it’s going to determine their under and over 99kg competitors. The team only has five spaces and two of them have already been allocated, as Levi Jones-Leary will compete at under 77kg and Lucas Kanard is the under 88kg representative. The other team-member at under 66kg is still yet to be confirmed, although Craig Jones announced previously that Giles would be using a wildcard for that slot.
The Qualifier for the under and over 99kg slots will take place over two stages, with the first one being a knockout tournament between 16 elite grapplers. The winner of this first stage still hasn’t got a place on the team and instead, they will have only earned a place in the second stage. There’s several elite competitors coming in at this point, and the early favorites will be ADCC Trials medalists Anton Minenko and Tito Carle. Harry Grech and Alex Hungahunga will be very tough to beat though and although he’s going to have a size disadvantage, multiple-time ADCC veteran Kenta Iwamoto has a good chance too.
Rounding out the bracket is Siraj Soufi, Burak Sarman, Josh Shipton, Thomas David, Josh Allsop, Harry Caesar, Adnan Larry, Urosh Culic, Josh Schofield, Matthew Oxenham, and Duke Didier. The winner of this tournament will then take up the final spot in a 6-man round-robin tournament alongside Declan Moody, Alibi Orazbek, Roberto Frias, Belal Etaibari, and Kaya Rudolph. That means that the winner of the opening stage will have to beat 4 tough Australasian grapplers in one day, before having 5 matches against some of the best competitors in the region. It’s going to be an absolute gauntlet for everyone involved and whoever the two men are that make it through, they will clearly deserve the opportunity to join the CJI 2 competitor list.
Lachlan Giles announced the full lineup for the CJI 2 Team Misfits Australasia Qualifier in a recent video uploaded to his official Youtube channel:
