Robert Whittaker opened up on Reinier de Ridder repeatedly grabbing his gloves in his UFC on ABC 9 loss.
Whittaker (26-9 MMA, 17-7 UFC) was edged out in a split decision loss to De Ridder (21-2 MMA, 4-0 UFC) in July in Abu Dhabi. The former middleweight champion almost finished De Ridder when he knocked him down in Round 3, but De Ridder survived.
However, De Ridder was seen grabbing Whittaker’s gloves when trying to avoid the follow-up shots on the ground, which Whittaker thinks potentially played a role in him surviving.
“The glove grabs were definitely prevalent when I was trying to finish him,” Whittaker told FOX Sports Australia. “That’s the biggest moment that he really took advantage of that. I think, I don’t know, in hindsight – yeah, it was annoying. His whole style is he comes up to you, clinches you, sags on you, and just kind of drains you that way, closing the distance, keeping it close.
“But while I was trying to finish him in the third, I couldn’t punch him. I couldn’t bring my arms back to get any sort of power. That’s the only real time – I even looked at the ref at one stage. There was a certain time I really felt the glove grabs being a bit of a problem. It is what it is. … I do think it’s along the same vein as cage grabbing. Like, guy survives a takedown or changes a position by grabbing the cage, huge upset.”
Although it was a close fight, Whittaker was classy in accepting the outcome of their fight.
“A lot of things I was happy with, a lot of things I was unhappy with,” Whittaker said. “Got to give it to De Ridder: He’s got a particular game plan. He makes it awkward for you. He’s good at what he does, and he executed. He pushed it on me and he came away with the split decision win. … It’s hard to quantify how much (De Ridder’s knees to the body) affected my gas tank. I was very tired in the later rounds.
“Maybe it affected it more than I thought. They didn’t tickle, I’ll give you that much. More than the actual impact and the damage that it did to me, because we did meticulously work for them, it’s more the amount that it stopped my rhythm. It stopped me moving forward, it stopped me from reaching in by a hair of an inch, and that kind of disrupted my attacking patterns, and I didn’t adapt. I didn’t adapt early enough until the later rounds.”
