Don’t bother showing up to UFC 188, Fabricio Werdum.
You have no chance. Cain Velasquez is going to kill you. Even if you make it to the fifth round, Velasquez is going to beat you up worse than he did Junior dos Santos.
Those are not my words. They belong to Velasquez’s head coach Javier Mendez. Mendez has been quite acerbic in the lead up to UFC 188, which features a heavyweight unification title fight between his main man Velasquez and interim champion Fabricio Werdum.
Just for fun, let’s let some of the quotes stand on their own (spread across the two articles linked to above):
“He’s [Cain] gonna kill him [Werdum].”
“Werdum’s not going to be able to handle the intensity”
“Werdum has no chance. Cain’s gonna do what he wants to do with him.”
“By saying a zero chance, it’s not an actual statement. “I’m saying he [Werdum] has little chance.
“He’s [Cain] going to win every round. He’s either going to stop him or give him the beating of his life.”
“He’s never going to make…if [Werdum] makes five rounds, he’s going to get beat up worse than JDS. I tell you that, I say that, and it will happen.”
If that weren’t enough, Mendez specified that Werdum isn’t on the same level as JDS.
“I’ll never forget how great of a fighter JDS is, and I’m sorry — Fabricio is good, I don’t take that away from him, he’s really good — but he’s not JDS. And there’s no one out there that’s at the level of JDS. There isn’t.”
JDS is, of course, Junior dos Santos, the lone man to hold a win over Velasquez. Dos Santos knocked the current heavyweight champ out back in 2011 on the first UFC on Fox fight card. Velasquez went on to get his revenge in the rematch and trilogy, pummeling JDS over the course of nearly 10 full rounds.
Mendez did say that Werdum’s best chance is a knockout or a submission. That he can’t win a decision. That nobody can beat Velasquez in a decision.
And that very well may be true. Luckily for Werdum, he’s been doing a pretty good job as of late beating guys by knockout or submission. He was the first man to submit the great Fedor Emelianenko. Most recently, he leveled Mark Hunt with a flying knee to claim the interim heavyweight belt.
But there is only one Cain Velasquez. He’s the cardio machine. He sets a relentless pace inside the cage that we’ve never seen from a fighter before. The only round Velasquez ever lost came courtesy of a perfectly placed punch from dos Santos.
He’s also been on the sidelines for 20 months.
Injury after injury has kept him from defending his belt. It got so bad that the last time he pulled out of a fight, at UFC 180 in Mexico City last November, the UFC put Mark Hunt in for him against Fabricio Werdum and made it an interim title fight. UFC President Dana White went as far as to say Velasquez could be stripped of his belt outright if he didn’t come back and defend it in a proper time frame.
Werdum, for his part, is doing everything he can to give himself an edge over the cardio king. He set up his camp in Mexico City 35 days before the fight. He’ll certainly be ready for the city’s punishing elevation.
Speaking to Guilherme Cruz of MMAFighting.com, Werdum said he expects Velasquez to be “100 percent physically, but not 100 percent mentally.” He added:
I expect a different win. I want to surprise the entire world one more time, especially the doubters. It won’t be easy, though. In a perfect world, I see him trying to take me down. I land a front kick to the body or his face, or I submit him quickly after he takes me down. In a more realistic scenario, I see him gassing after three or four rounds. People will be surprised. They are used to watching Velasquez with that non-stop rhythm, but he’s not used with high-altitude and hasn’t fought in two years. We’ll see.
Werdum, who himself has dropped a little trash talk into the ether, told Bleacher Report’s Hunter Homistek that his belt is the real one (due to Velasquez’s inactivity).
All of this sets up to make for a great heavyweight fight. MMA fans haven’t had a heavyweight fight to anticipate this much since perhaps the rematch between Velasquez and dos Santos back in December 2012 at UFC 155.
Even the one and only Stone Cold Steve Austin thinks Cain Velasquez is still the baddest man on the planet. The champ will get a chance to prove that still holds true this weekend when he looks to unify the belt against the incredibly confident Fabricio Werdum.
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