Tonight at Bellator 98, Alexander Shlemenko fights Brett Copper for the MW title, but he isn’t happy.

images (1)

What’s cool is that we see our bud, Brett Cooper, be the first man to take advantage of the Bellator tournament injury clause and step in for Doug Marshall to face Shlemenko tonight. A few years ago, Cooper lost to Shlemenko in a fun fight, but we all know his time down at Reign has changed him since then. The figth should be great, and all are happy to get paid, but not Shlemenko. He’s used to getting up to 7-10 fights a year, and he’s only fought twice in the last 18 months currently. Sure, he was injured in a care accident a while back, but that doesn’t matter to Storm, he needs to fight – more.

Check out this interview with MMA Fighting, and don’t forget to watch the stacked Bellator 98 card tonight on Spike.

“It was a very, very difficult time for me,” said Shlemenko. “It was extremely hard for me not to fight as often as I can. It was very disappointing for me. It was not my fault that I didn’t fight for so long, so I hope in the future this will change and I will be able to fight more often and Bellator will provide me with such opportunities.”

“I had to wait for the next tournament winner,” Shlemenko said of his time after winning the Bellator middleweight tournament and waiting for a title shot. “All this time I was sitting without a fight. It was [hard] for me. When I couldn’t fight in Bellator, my manager, Alexei Zhernakov, he could arrange fights for me in Russia or some other country. But since I was a title contender, Bellator didn’t allow me to do that.

“Of course I tried to do stuff to feed myself and my family. I did some seminars, I did some train work. However I can say that the situation was very difficult for me and I didn’t like it at all. I really hope that Bellator will do everything to improve the situation so that it will never occur again.”

“I represent Bellator now. I can say that I am one of the top faces of Bellator. And I, for myself, would like to fight as often as possible. Fighting in the pay-per-view, of course it would be great, because it would the first. A historical event, the first pay-per-view by Bellator, and a lot of exciting fights are going to there.”