Dricus du Plessis was prepared for everything at UFC 319 last August in Chicago.
Well, everything except an opponent who was “not willing to fight.” I guess he never heard of “the art of fighting, without fighting,” made famous in the 1973 martial arts classic, Enter the Dragon.
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“We made small, small mistakes that cost us dearly every minute of every round in that fight,“ coach Morne Visser told Fight Forecast (via Betway South Africa). “So, easy, easy fixes. We were just not prepared. It sounds stupid what I’m gonna say now, but we were not prepared. We’ve never been prepared to fight a guy who’s not willing to fight. If we knew he was gonna try to just do that, I would have changed Dricus’s base. No punches, no kicks, just flipping wrestle the guy. And Dricus is good enough to do that. But it’s an MMA fight. I know Marc Goddard doesn’t agree with me … you should have stood that fight up many, many times. He didn’t want to fight.”
Yes, it’s an MMA fight, and wrestling is part of MMA.
Dricus was dominated for all five rounds, losing his middleweight title to the undefeated “Borz.”
“It looked like if we knew nothing on the floor,” Visser continued. “I must be honest, we knew nothing about how to get a blanket off us. But this time around, he’s gonna get f*cked up. Look, he’s got zero chance against Dricus with the stand up. Zero. He’s got zero chance with Dricus in the clinch. His only chance is to keep us on the floor. So that’s the only thing we need to fix. And if you look back at the fight, keep people saying, ‘Ah, you don’t know how to wrestle.‘ That’s the only thing he did. He only had to hold onto Dricus for 25 minutes to win the fight. That’s what he did, so he did his job well. We’ll make sure that will never, ever happens again.”
Despite talk of an immediate rematch, both Du Plessis and Chimaev remain unbooked.
