Dean Amasinger
As series nine of The Ultimate Fighter goes to air, setanta.com will speak to one of the main characters from each week's episode.
Beginning with the preliminary fights to determine Team UK, setanta.com spoke exclusively to welterweight Nick Osipczak.
Once inside the house, we will then speak to the British fighter who succeeds or fails in each week's eliminator.
Don't miss a thing here, and email us any questions you would like us to put to the individual contestants.
I’d pay to get a rematch with DaMarques
If there is one fight, more than any other in my MMA career, that has left me with nothing but complete frustration...it is the defeat to DaMarques Johnson on The Ultimate Fighter.
When we talked about match-ups as a team ahead of the show’s first fight, I actually wanted to fight Mark Miller – the man beaten by Nick Ozipczak. I wanted a proper dust-up with him. He would have been my first choice and we had both joked about a ‘battle of the beards’ with the loser having to shave his off.
But the coaches looked at things differently so they paired me up with DaMarques Johnson which, again, I was pretty happy with because we knew I could break him down in the stand-up, using my wrestling abilities to stuff his takedown attempts. It would have worked too if I had stuck to the gameplan!
Looking back on the fight, I wrote in a journal every day when I was out there and on the night of the fight I couldn’t remember how it had ended up on the floor. I actually wrote ‘somehow it hit the deck’.
It wasn’t until I watched it back that I realised I took him down, which shows I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for that fight. If you look, my footwork is unusual too – my head wasn’t in the right place for that fight.