Coach: “Robin van Roosmalen is tough but Serhiy Adamchuk doesn’t back down”

“It’s gonna be a tough fight, everyone will get their money’s worth. We all know Robin is a tough cookie and Serhiy doesn’t back down,” says Mike Passenier, head coach of Amsterdam institution Mike’s Gym and trainer of Serhiy Adamchuk (35-8).    Former featherweight champion Adamchuk is challenging current featherweight champion Robin van Roosmalen (38-7) for the belt in the GLORY 45 AMSTERDAM main event. The straight-talking Passenier says fans can expect a war.    “We will be more aggressive because that’s the only way to win and that’s the way it should be. I think more fighters should do that. Once you are on this stage, you should be showing everything that you have,” he says.    “In my opinion, it’s either Robin winning by KO or us winning by points. I don’t see Robin being KO’d. He used to fight at 70kgs and not get KO’d so I can’t see him fighting at 65kg and getting KO’d. It may be that he has some problems making weight though.”   Adamchuk first found his way to the GLORY championship by using his highly creative fighting intelligence to bait his opponents into traps and counter-attack them while avoiding damage. It was a very educated stye but one which sometimes left fans wanting to see more energy.    Between fights, Passenier was working with Adamchuk on bringing out the attacking strengths that he knew the Ukranian possessed. The results of those efforts were made clear at the recent GLORY 42 PARIS event when Adamchuk blitzed Dylan Salvador and took a clear decision win over him.   According to Passenier, the changes wrought in Adamchuk have not been so much technical as psychological: he has simply been encouraging him to “be the best version of Serhiy Adamchuk that you can be.”   “It’s not that he wasn’t already doing well, but sometimes you need to go deeper, find more. You saw that in his last fight, against Dylan Salvador in Paris,” he says.   Of course, it’s no coincidence that the change also brings Adamchu closer in line with the Mike’s Gym house style. Fighters from the gym embrace the ideals of ancient Sparta - “Come home with your shield, or else on it” - and are almost always in crowd-pleasing wars.   “Look, it’s not just about winning or losing the fight. Sometimes a guy can win a fight but really he’s lost in a bigger sense, or lose the fight but win in a bigger way. Because the only judges who really matter are the fans who are paying their money to see you fight,” says Passenier.    “There is no secret to our fighting style. We like to fight with guys who want to fight and we don’t like to fight with guys who don’t want to fight. One thing for sure you can say about Robin is that he comes to fight. So that’s how I know this will be a good fight next week.”   GLORY 45 AMSTERDAM takes place on Saturday, September 30 at the Sporthallen Zuid in Amsterdam, Netherlands.    GLORY 45 Amsterdam is set to air live on ESPN3 on Saturday, September 30th, 2017 at 3:30pm Eastern time (ET) and replay on ESPN2 on Sunday, October 1st, 2017 at 11pm ET.