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“It will happen. I know how to push his buttons. He’s such a meathead, I can push his buttons and make him do what I want him to do.”
Israel Adesanya believes there are lots of similarities between his inevitable title fight with Paulo Costa and the featherweight showdown between Jose Aldo and Conor McGregor at UFC 194.
McGregor antagonized and belittled Aldo for an entire year before the Irishman slept ‘Scarface’ with a counter left hook at 00:13 of the opening round in the UFC 194 main event at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand Garden Arena.
While the UFC has yet to book a promotional world tour for Adesanya vs. Costa, ‘The Last Stylebender’ believes he’s just as much in ‘Borrachinha’s’ head as McGregor was in Aldo’s.
“You know one thing that fight reminded me of? McGregor-Aldo,” Adesanya said on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show, per BJPENN.com.
“It will happen. I know how to push his buttons. He’s such a meathead, I can push his buttons and make him do what I want him to do. Counter him,” Adesanya said. “People were always used to my linear attacks, they didn’t know about my lateral attacks. My hooks. They thought when I started countering Rob, they forget that’s what I first started doing when I started kickboxing. I was a counter striker. I went back to my roots, and I was just hitting from all angles. Like literally hitting him from all angles. Even when I was in ‘The Matrix’, caught him with an uppercut. So Paula is a guy, he’s a really aggressive bull, but I can be a matador.”
Adesanya, the UFC’s newly-minted middleweight champion, was expected to defend his title against Costa in the new year but the Brazilian was forced out of the bout due to injury.
It’s now teased that the Nigerian-New Zealander will face Yoel ‘Soldier of God’ Romero sometime early next year.