Israel Adesanya, UFC middleweight champion, spoke to the media and addressed the call outs from former number one contender, Paulo Costa, who has been eager to get his rematch in one of the most anticipated fights of the year, as ‘Stylebender’ decimated the Brazilian powerhouse who fans saw as his toughest challenge.
He poked fun at the recent social media call-outs and seemingly dismissed the proposed rematch. He said, “Everybody wants to see that, no time to jokes.”
Israel Adesanya compares Paulo Costa to Vettori and Gastelum, and broke down his thoughts on the way Costa had approached the call out. He compared this with two of his previous opponents; former title contender, Kelvin Gastelum, and Italian fighter, Marvin Vettori as examples.
“Okay, I’ll give you a classic example,” Adesanya said. “I fought two teammates, I fought the Italian, and there’s Kelvin Gastelum.” He described his bump in with Marvin Vettori in Las Vegas. Adesanya was there to watch his City Kickboxing teammate, UFC featherweight champion, Alex Volkanovski’s fight.
The middleweight duo fought out a close split decision fight back in April 2018, with the fighter from New Zealand getting his hand raised. On that night, he felt like Vettori had won the fight. Furthermore, he believed the Italian fighter has held on to that fact while the gap between them has widened.
“He holds on to that because he knows deep down, he’ll never see me again… never get a title shot again,” Stylebender noted. He then compared it to Gastelum’s approach and said, “All he gives is respect, you know why? Because he believes he’s going to get there again.”
Now that Adesanya has defended his title, he will want to take some time off and heal as the title contender picture clears up. The winner of Robert Whittaker vs Jared Cannonier presumably will be next in line to challenge for middleweight gold.
The actual fight that fans want to see is the super fight between the legendary Jon ‘Bones’ Jones and ‘Stylebender’. Their recent spats on Twitter have driven the interest of the MMA community towards this fight.
