UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya dismisses the notion that he was trying to cruise to victory against Jared Cannonier.
Adesanya (23-1 MMA, 12-1 UFC) outpointed Cannonier (15-6 MMA, 8-6 UFC) in the UFC 276 main event but was criticized after he didn’t deliver on his pre-fight claim that he would do something “spectacular.”
While Adesanya wasn’t ecstatic with his performance, he was happy. He pointed to Max Holloway’s prediction of finishing UFC featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski as an example, and how Holloway didn’t catch as much flack after he was dominated for five rounds in the co-main event.
“Look, you can go down that whole fight card and people saying what they’re gonna do in the fight,” Adesanya said on his YouTube channel. “Not just myself but other athletes. Shoutout to Max Holloway. He said, ‘I’ll be surprised if this goes more than three rounds,’ because he was that confident in himself. He didn’t get the job done, but you’re not gonna kick a man while he’s down.”
He continued, “We all believe in what we’re gonna do, not just Max. Everyone else, ‘I feel like I’m gonna do this,’ and I know what I can do, and I know what I could have done to him and what I was trying to do to him, but it just didn’t happen the way I wanted it to. But again, I’m the one getting flack. There was no bit in that fight where I took my foot off the gas in the sense I was coasting. I wasn’t coasting.”
Adesanya’s performance was met by boos from the crowd, but considering Cannonier’s power, “The Last Stylebender” wasn’t about to cave into the pressure.
“I was like, I’m gonna keep touching him, and I’m gonna keep touching him until he falls,” Adesanya said. “I didn’t want to overcommit because if I overcommit, I knew he was going to counter me, or I would leave myself in a vulnerable position, and that’s stupid. But I was right there in his face.”
He continued, “If you want to say I ran away in this fight, I don’t know how you’re gonna say that. I was right there in his face hitting him, striking with him. So I don’t know. People might try and say, ‘Oh, he’s this and that.’ Footwork was one of the main things. I took away 60 percent of his shots, his strikes. The other was just hand control, distance management and just basics. My jab, things like that.”
