Gordon Ryan will be taking on Pedro Marinho at the next Who’s Number One event on 14th July and the former’s coach, John Danaher, has shared his views on the match. After originally agreeing to a fight for the Light-Heavyweight title that Marinho currently holds, the pair instead moved up to the Heavyweight division to fight for the vacant title after Tim Spriggs was stripped of the belt. The pair are actually no strangers to each other both on the mats and over the internet, having met previously in competition and going back and forth on social media in recent times.
John Danaher actually commented on the first time that Gordon Ryan and Pedro Marinho met on the mats, at the 2019 ADCC world championships when his student submitted Marinho with a heelhook in the opening round:
“I got the impression that at that stage, Pedro just didn’t really study the heel hook and so he got caught. If you don’t know the leg lock game, you’re gonna get caught by it. So I didn’t hold that against him.”
As he goes on to clarify, this shouldn’t be as much of an issue for Marinho anymore after he demonstrated his improvements in a match against Craig Jones that saw him become the WNO Light-Heavyweight champion:
“The last two years, you gotta give it to Pedro Marinho, he improved so much. First of all, he’s defensively very strong now on leg locks. He proved that recently against Craig Jones. Craig is a master of leg locks and Pedro was able to completely shut that aspect of Craig’s game down. That was very impressive.”
John Danaher goes on to give full credit to Pedro Marinho as an opponent and explain both his biggest strengths and his path to victory against Gordon Ryan:
“He’s got great physicality. He’s got a great sense of how to understand the ruleset and use tactics to win. Physically he’s a real specimen. He will go in against Gordon with a height disadvantage, but he went in with a height disadvantage to Craig and it didn’t prove to be a problem at all. He finds a way to make his body type work for him. He’s got a nasty arm-in guillotine. Does it well on both sides… I think he’s gonna be a really tough opponent…”
“I think there’s gonna be a lot of standing wrestling in this fight, unlike the first one where Gordon just came straight out and they went straight to ground. I think Pedro will have much better anti-leg lock anti-leg lock tactics this time. And Pedro has, as I said, a nasty guillotine, and he proved also he’s got very good guard passing with no-gi.”
“From Pedro’s perspective, he has the advantage that even if he just puts on a strong performance against Gordon, he doesn’t have to submit Gordon, imagine if he passed Gordon’s guard a couple of times, like he did with Craig. Imagine if he was initiating most of the standing tie ups and outworking Gordon, that would be enough to win a decision and he’d be a legend if he did that. I think that this is gonna be a very tough, scrappy, physical match… It’s gonna come down a lot to pacing.”
The full interview with John Danaher where he breaks down the match between his most famous student Gordon Ryan and the reigning WNO Light-Heavyweight champion Pedro Marinho was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of FloGrappling:
