Posting on social media after the fight, Tairua-Bracken said he was grateful for the fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cStill growing still evolving with my team!<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really out here doing our thing. I\u2019m so blessed & forever grateful for the people around me. Bring on the next chapter!<\/p>\n
\u201cTo my opponent, my sponsors & the people around me: u already know it\u2019s love nothing but love!\u201d<\/p>\n
Tairua-Bracken said he was now looking to be at the next BX-9 event, scheduled for December 13, however, the venue and line-up have not been announced yet.<\/p>\n
Tairua-Bracken was one of three Waikato competitors taking part in Arsenal X.<\/p>\n
Isaac \u201cThe Nightmare\u201d Tshikula, 21, took on Waelin Karekare, 24, of Gisborne, while Hayden Crawford-Williams was scheduled to fight Mandela Ale, however, due to unknown reasons, the latter fight was pulled.<\/p>\n
Tshikula and Karekare both walked into the fight at about 62kgs.<\/p>\n
However, Karekare had a significant height advantage. <\/p>\n
In the first round, boxing, Tshikula was accurate with his punches, landing and moving away.<\/p>\n
Karekare did not use his reach and height, giving the Hamilton boxer chances to land some clean shots.<\/p>\n
Round two, K1 kickboxing, was a little more even as Karekare was landing more shots, but this time with kicks.<\/p>\n
Karekare did not throw many punches but was succeeding in throwing and landing lower kicks.<\/p>\n
Tshikula was throwing a lot more finesse in his shots, doing spinning back fist strikes and spinning back kicks.<\/p>\n
In round three, muay thai, both fighters were coming in aggressive.<\/p>\n
It was a close fight and could have gone either way: Tshikula was very fast but Karekare continued to land lower kicks.<\/p>\n
In the end it was Karekare who came away with the win by unanimous decision.<\/p>\n
Benjamin Watt is a retired boxing judge and New Zealand boxing writer with a decade of experience. Watt has also been BoxRec\u2019s New Zealand record-keeper since 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Posting on social media after the fight, Tairua-Bracken said he was grateful for the fight. \u201cStill growing still…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165100,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[96448,9490,3361,64,22065,63,106343,18576,5946,2976,786,887,2990,785,108617,11509,90457,108619,85,108618,6449,320,4893,8935],"class_list":["post-165099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-96448","tag-after","tag-arsenal","tag-au","tag-auckland","tag-australia","tag-clocked","tag-combat","tag-event","tag-fighter","tag-fighting","tag-hamilton","tag-knockout","tag-mma","tag-pikiao","tag-quick","tag-recent","tag-seconds","tag-sports","tag-tairuabracken","tag-takes","tag-the","tag-tiger","tag-win"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}