New England Cartel head coach Tyson Chartier is ready to move on from Arnold Allen if booking the fight for Calvin Kattar takes any longer.
Chartier, who also serves as Kattar’s manager, said he asked the UFC for the Allen fight multiple times before a matchup Allen also expressed interest in recently. The pair were on a collision course in late 2021, but the fight never materialized.
With Allen currently sidelined due to a hand injury, Chartier also sees former title challenger Chan Sung Jung (17-7 MMA, 7-4 UFC) as a good option for Kattar (23-6 MMA, 7-4 UFC).
“The ‘Zombie’ fight is fun,” Chartier told MMA Junkie. “They’re both coming off losses. He’s already been resting a little bit. We probably don’t need as long of a rest, so I think the timeline matches up. Arnold Allen is not even worth trying to book. We’ve been offered him before, we accepted, it was a frustrating fight to try to book. It seems like he’s always either injured or wants to go on vacation or a concert with his girlfriend, or I don’t know. But he called us out and we said yes, we’ll fight you in 10 weeks, and he said, ‘Well, that’s not long enough.’
“So we want to fight real fighters. I’m not saying he’s not a real fighter, but if you can’t be ready to fight in 10 weeks coming off of a win, then maybe you’re in the wrong sport. I don’t know. It’s frustrating. So, yeah, we’ll see. I think the ‘Zombie’ fight makes a lot of sense. I think it’s a fun fight, he’s a banger, he’ll probably try and wrestle us a little bit. Calvin has shown that he has good takedown defense, so then that means it turns into a nice Calvin Kattar fight.”
Kattar is coming off a close decision loss to Josh Emmett at UFC on ESPN 37 in June, but Chartier doesn’t think his stock dropped. He expects Kattar to return by fall.
“I think he’s looking at probably another really good fight, probably another main event, who knows, or on a pay-per-view,” Chartier said. “We can’t control that, but there’s a bunch of hungry kids coming up behind us that maybe we have to knock off one of them again. Calvin’s been doing pretty good with that – Ige and Giga (Chikadze) – so they give us these guys on win streaks and Calvin does pretty good.”
