UFC: Brendan Allen on callout of Dricus Du Plessis
Brendan Allen is not surprised by Dricus Du Plessis’ silence in the aftermath of his UFC Fight Night 262 callout.
Brendan Allen is not surprised by Dricus Du Plessis’ silence in the aftermath of his UFC Fight Night 262 callout.
Allen (26-7 MMA, 14-4 UFC) scored one of the biggest wins of his career this past Saturday when he overwhelmed Reinier de Ridder into a fourth-round corner stoppage TKO at Rogers Arena in Vancouver. He took the fight on roughly three weeks’ notice, and after coming through with a big performance made several callouts, the most realistic of which put target on former middleweight champion Du Plessis (23-3 MMA, 9-1 UFC).
There’s a history of Allen and Du Plessis taking shots at each other online and in interviews. It has been radio silence from Du Plessis this time, however and Allen admits that it’s somewhat expected still less than three months removed from a one-sided title loss to Khamzat Chimaev at UFC 319 in August.
“Dricus always has something to say when I’m losing because he knows I’m a super tough test and I can probably beat him,” Allen told MMA Junkie. “Obviously he’s a fighter so he’s going to think he’s going to beat me, but he knows it’s a tough test. It’s easy to say when I’m losing when you know you’re not going to fight me next, but now it’s like, it could happen. When I was super close on a big win streak and it was a possibility, he was super quiet like a mouth in church.
“Now you don’t hear anything from him, but what can you really say now. He literally just got dominated. Not a close fight. Not had moments. None of that. You got dominated for 25 minutes. I’ll be nice and say you got dominated for 23.5 minutes. What can you really say? To me that’s a huge word: Dominated. To me that’s a very big word. It carries a lot of weight. That means you did nothing. You had nothing really for the other guy at all. That’s what happened, and you were supposed to be the champion and you got dominated? That’s not supposed to happen at that level.”
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Allen, No. 7 in the latest USA TODAY Sports/MMA Junkie middleweight rankings, said he expects No. 2-ranked Du Plessis to make changes to his game after dropping the belt to Chimaev.
Given Allen’s strong ground game, there would be expectation he would try to follow the blue print laid out by the current titleholder, but said that’s not necessarily the case.
Do I think he’ll go out and make changes and come back better? For sure. I do. But he got dominated. … Everyone’s going to think just cause I see that I’m going to go out there and try to wrestle him and get him down. The fight starts striking. I want to strike. I want to go with guys that try to kill or be killed. I like that. It’s what excites me. It’s what makes me nervous, but it’s also what brings out the best version of me.
“That’s why I wanted to fight him coming up. I thought he was really lucky on some of the fights that he had leading to the belt. That was one reason, but it was also because I know he’s going to come to kill or be killed.”
