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“He looked good in that fight man, gotta give it to him. I don’t like the guy [laughs] but he’s bloody good.”
There’s certainly no love lost between Robert Whittaker and Israel Adesanya, but ‘The Reaper’ can no longer deny ‘The Last Stylebender’s’ talent following UFC 256, which saw Adesanya TKO Paulo Costa in the second round of the main event to retain his middleweight title.
Whittaker, too, suffered a second round stoppage loss to Adesanya at UFC 243 and, while he might not like the reigning middleweight champ, admits he’s ‘bloody good’ and worthy of the UFC middleweight title.
“Did I expect him to finish him in that fashion? No, I did not,” Whittaker told ESPN in a recent interview (h/t Abhinav Kini of The Body Lock MMA). “But everything leading up to the finish I saw as a possibility. He looked good in that fight man, gotta give it to him. I don’t like the guy [laughs] but he’s bloody good.
“… I think Izzy really controlled him. A lot of people are gonna say Paulo Costa didn’t do much, and maybe he didn’t, but Izzy controlled that fight very, very well. It’s very hard for people to speak on Costa, why he didn’t do what he did because he was in there. It’s hard to move forward against a counter striker like that, especially when he’s making you pay every time you go in. Izzy just controlled that fight. Hats off to Izzy, good fight. Certainly [knew Adesanya was good], but it was just reinforced in these last couple of fights,”
Whittaker believes the key to victory against Adesanya is to beat the Nigerian-New Zealander at his own game: counter striking.
“You gotta wait for him to come forward,” he said. “You got to play his game, you can’t move in on him. His counter striking is honestly, it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. You have to take that into consideration when preparing for him.”
Whittaker rebounded from his loss to Adesanya with a unanimous decision win over Darren Till at UFC on ESPN 14 and will look to return to the Octagon later this month when he takes on Jared Cannonier in the UFC 254 co-main event. The pay-per-view, which features a headlining lightweight title unification bout between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Justin Gaethje, takes place on Oct. 24 at Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.