Cage Warriors confirms return from UK lockdown with September triple-header

Cage Warriors are set to return with a bang, with the promotion confirming they will hold a triple-header of events later this summer.

The promotion’s president Graham Boylan announced his plans with a tweet stating his intention to hold three events, back to back, in September, and he confirmed those plans to MMA Junkie as he laid out more concrete information about the UK promotion’s ambitious plans.

“Things are fun, in the sense that I love (expletive) chaos,” Boylan explained. “It’s Christmas time to me, and I just decided to stick myself into more chaos by deciding to run three events, back-to-back.”

Cage Warriors will hold their triple-header on successive nights on September 24, 25, and 26, with all three events set to be streamed live worldwide on UFC Fight Pass.

Boylan said the decision to run three shows was born out of the desire to get as many of his contracted fighters as possible back into active competition after a lengthy period of lockdown in the UK.

“For me, it is a no-brainer for us,” Boylan explained. “We’ve been speaking to arenas and they’ve been telling us they’re not expecting crowds, or arena shows with big crowds, this side of Christmas. So when we’re hearing that from the biggest arenas in the world, telling us these things, we’re trying to pre-empt what we can do to keep the organization running, and to keep the roster busy. For some of the fighters, they’re getting no income right now. They need to compete. They need to earn money.

“With restrictions lifting in the UK and things starting to ease, we’re still three months until these show dates. So by the time these show dates come, things could ease up again. So for now it’s a behind-closed-doors event.

“I don’t think it’s fair on the roster for us to come back and just do one show, because guys have been sitting out the whole time. I want to get and show the Cage Warriors is a fighters’ promotion. It always has been. And we will always do what we can for the fighters. That’s why I said we’re going to do three events, back to back, and get the roster off the shelves. We’re going to do three of them to get the roster moving again.”

The UK’s COVID-19 restrictions are starting to ease, but as things stand the intention is for the three events to be held behind closed doors, utilizing a similar setup to the one the promotion employed at the arena for their most recent show, Cage Warriors 113, which took place behind closed doors in March, just two days before the UK went into lockdown. Boylan said the experience of running that event will prove invaluable as they prepare to repeat the trick – three times in three nights – in September.

“We have a blueprint to follow that we had to make up ourselves for the first show,” he said. “Nobody gave us any kind of guidelines, it was just myself and my medical team. Now we’ve got guidelines on top of that, so it makes things a bit easier to put procedures in place to make this work. For example, for these upcoming events, nobody’s arriving on the day of the show, so people are going to have to be here two days before the show.”

Those guidelines and procedures will also involve COVID testing, and Boylan revealed that he had secured the services of a company that could turn around test results in 24 hours. Fighters will be required to check in at the host hotel, be tested, then remain isolated until the results are confirmed the following day.

“Once the tests come back the next day, then we’ll know what we’ve got and what hand we’ve got to play,” he said. “We might lose some fights, we may be OK – we don’t know. But until we do this we can’t answer a lot of these questions. But as of today, June 25, we have that in place. Come September, these guidelines could change again. This is a daily-changing experience for everyone.”

With an arena locked in and a blueprint for holding behind-closed-doors fights already in the books thanks to their successful show in Manchester in March, the job now falls to Boylan and Cage Warriors matchmaker Ian Dean to fill out the three fight cards with compelling matchups.

“We’ve got three spreadsheets of fights we want to put on, but we haven’t spoken to the guys who we want to fight yet. Ian’s got a busy week or two ahead!” Boylan laughed. “We’ve already provisionally matched 70% of each night, and it’s a case of just contacting the managers and the camps and getting a yes or a no.

“There will probably be a maximum of 10 fights per card. We’ll be looking at our roster and who can compete against one another and create some fights that bring some value to the next three or four months. We’re not going to put fights on for the sake of it – the fights need to make sense to the promotion, and the divisions. We’ll match it cleverly, we’ll match it fairly, and we’ll be looking at the Cage Warriors roster internally before anything gets offered to anybody outside.

“I would assume there would be a minimum of one title fight per night, possibly two.”