Dominick Cruz isn’t sure Dricus Du Plessis can close the gap with Khamzat Chimaev after UFC 319.
Du Plessis (23-3 MMA, 9-1 UFC) lost his UFC middleweight title when he was taken down 12 times and controlled for more than 21 minutes in a lopsided decision loss to Chimaev (15-0 MMA, 9-0 UFC) earlier this month.
His head coach, Morne Visser, said they were a little bit behind in their Russian-style wrestling, but Cruz doesn’t like what he saw out of Du Plessis in the fight and isn’t confident that he can regain his belt from Chimaev.
“He says six months, I’ll fill some gaps, but when I look at that, that’s not six months,” Cruz said on the “Anik & Florian Podcast.” “He didn’t separate one time – like, nothing. His legs weren’t getting involved from his back. He’s just never been put on his back that long, I don’t think, and you have to have an offense from the bottom in order to get up. If your job when you get taken down is just to get up and escape, that’s kind of defensive in a way. So, if you’re on the bottom and you’re getting held down, you have to have some sort of offensive attack from the bottom. Like, you need to go for a single-leg (takedown).
“You need to be able to be off balance to get to a double leg. You need to be able to get off balance to create space and get to a front headlock, and then you have to create some sort of offense from the bottom. Some sort of attack, so that the person on top of you stops blanketing you, and he couldn’t really create that. When you look at the differential in that particular fight, it just looked like two completely different level fighters, because the separation wasn’t there. Now, I could say if DDP got away one time, I would have a totally different thing to say, but he didn’t, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t get away once. He couldn’t separate once.”
Cruz went onto clarify that Chimaev specifically is a bad matchup for Du Plessis.
“I think DDP beats almost everybody else in the division,” Cruz said. “Just that particular matchup is just really exposing stuff, and that’s the thing about being champion.”
