Eckerlin after the loss to Apollo: He has twice as many wins as I have games! I think I made his life a little harder

At the Oktagon 49 tournament, one of the most interesting matches from the fans’ point of view was Christian Eckerlin vs. Leandro Silva. The home favourite received a huge ovation and was loudly supported even during the match, but in the end he had to bow to the Brazilian. What did he say after the defeat?

The darling of the German public went into the fight with Apollo Silva as an underdog, but he tried to be active. He lost the first round on the ground and although he got up in the second, the Brazilian took him down again, this time with a hard punch.

In the third round the roles reversed and it was Eckerlin who took his opponent to the ground. The final minute offered a stand-up shootout in which Eckerlin took one punch and Apollo saw the fight to a points decision.

Unsurprisingly, he ended up being the winner, which was not taken lightly by the fans in the arena. Eckerlin put on a good performance, but this time it just wasn’t enough and he scored his sixth career MMA defeat after a long layoff.

Eckerlin was dejected at the press conference

“I don’t know what was missing today… You have to have balls to challenge such a strong opponent after a 13-month break, it was a brutal fight… I said at the press conference that this is a huge event, nobody lost or won today, it’s a win for the whole of Germany.

19,000 spectators? That’s something unreal, I’m really happy for that, I think we’re all happy… The fightcard was packed, the best fighters of Germany fought here. And what did it fail on?

Apollo has twice as many wins as I have fights, I think I made his life a little bit harder, but he was just better today. It was a great fight. He himself said that what he experienced today was unreal and incomparable to anything he has experienced,” he said at the press conference.

Even though he lost, he was pleased with the crowd, which was loudly supporting him from the moment he entered the cage. He was understandably pleased that nearly 20,000 spectators found their way into the arena and broke MMA records in Germany.

“If someone had told me two years ago that we were going to fight in front of 10k, let alone 20k people, I would have told you you were crazy… We used to fight in front of 2k people at most… It’s amazing, you can see how many top fighters are here, we have to keep it up and make the German scene as big as possible,” he added.

Source: Oktagon MMA