Subversion will be crowning their first heavyweight champion in the main event of Subversion 4: Ascension on December 2nd, 2023, as Josh Saunders and Roberto Frias will battle for the title. Although the promotion is still relatively young, they’ve quickly become known for putting on some fantastic shows that attract the best grapplers from all around Australia and even further beyond. This matchup is a testament to that fact, as they’ve managed to book two talented Australian ADCC veterans to compete against one another.
Both Saunders and Frias won the ADCC Asia and Oceana Trials in 2022, but they were pretty far apart in weight at that point. Saunders won the over 99kg division at that event while Frias won his invite at under 88kg instead, so he should be giving up some weight coming into this title-fight. Both men had incredibly tough draws once they stepped on to the mats at ADCC 2022, and they actually both lost on points in the opening round of their respective divisions. Saunders was up against 2017 ADCC world champion Felipe Pena, while Frias had drawn 2019 ADCC world champion Matheus Diniz.
They were massive challenges for both men and although they couldn’t get past their first opponents at ADCC 2022, they have still established themselves as two of the top grapplers in Australia. Josh Saunders will almost certainly have the size advantage when they meet, but Roberto Frias is significantly more experienced than his opponent. Saunders has been only training BJJ for around 3 years and it’s incredible that he’s reached such a high level in such a short space of time, but Frias obviously has multiple times the amount of mat time that Saunders does. It’ll be interesting to see if Frias is able to use that to his advantage, or if Saunders will be able to continue his impressive run of beating more experienced opponents.
Subversion announced the news that Josh Saunders and Roberto Frias will fight for the inaugural heavyweight title in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
