In a battle of bantamweight prospects, Cass Bell came up short in his last fight.
Battling Raufeon Stots back in July, Bell succumbed to a rear-naked choke, losing his perfect record in the process. And so, for the first time in his career, the now 5-1 Bell enters Bellator 256 looking to get back in the win column. With plenty of learning experiences from that last fight.
“What I learned my last fight is, Stots had a lot of good, obviously good grappling, good control too. So he was really able to pick my game apart a little bit here and there,” Bell told media outlets including Cageside Press during this week’s Bellator 256 virtual media day. “I learned a lot from that, I actually learned some of the stuff he was doing that you guys will see this fight too, that I’m going to bring with me to the table.”
When it comes down to it, downtime in the pandemic did not help Bell’s performance against Stots, to say the least. “I’m getting older now, so I can’t just all of a sudden start training,” he observed. “I took two months off before that fight, doing nothing, and then I got that call four weeks before, which is really three weeks. To take that fight — of course I’m going to take that fight, especially when I was told I wasn’t going to fight for like a year. So getting back in shape, that was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. Going into that fight, I was definitely not in any shape to go. But I made it almost all three rounds, so with my performance, I was actually a little good with it.”
It seems, on the outside at least, that Bell isn’t too torn up by the loss. He confirmed that, stating that “I hate losing, but I don’t think I was too effected about it besides making sure I’m training, and making sure I have a full, full fight camp.”
The way he looks at it, said Bell, “I saw Stots at his best, because he was able to train the whole time, and not take any days off. Myself, I couldn’t train. So he saw me at my worst, I saw him at his best. Hopefully one day I can get that rematch, as long as we both keep winning, and get that loss off my record.”
As he enters his Bellator 256 fight, with another undefeated fighter in Jornel Lugo, there’s even less reason to be down, given that he holds the #8 spot in the official bantamweight rankings. “To be ranked in the top ten, I was stoked,” exclaimed Bell.
Watch the full Bellator 256 virtual media day scrum with Cass Bell above. The event takes place Friday, April 9 at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, CT.
