"There's no f****** way I'm losing this fight," the UFC's reigning middleweight champion Israel Adesanya says of his rematch with former champion Robert Whittaker. This is the pressure he puts on himself, "I make it difficult for myself, that I just feel like I can't lose."
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
"I already whooped his ass," continues Adesanya, but he's careful not to fall into the trap of focusing on past achievements. In 2019 Adesanya knocked Whittaker out in the second round in front of a hostile Australian crowd, to claim his undisputed championship title. Whittaker was lucky to survive the first round, having been knocked down right as the buzzer sounded. Adesanya recalls seeing Whittaker look up at the big screen in between rounds and telling him, "'Don't look at the TV, that's in the past, this is now.'"
"So same thing, I'm not really too worried about that fight. That's in the past. This is now. There's no room for error. I'm going to do what I did last time, but worse."
Since the pair last met, Whittaker has gone on an impressive three fight win streak and has since admitted Adesanya's trash talk ahead of the first fight got to him and threw him off his game.
This time there has been less talk from Adesanya, although City Kickboxing head coach Eugene Bareman has stepped in for some gentle trolling of Whittaker fans by suggesting Whittaker didn't want, nor deserved the rematch.
"I don't really have to troll. He [Bareman] can have fun this time," Adesanya said. "There's no need for me to do anything. I just need to show up and whup him again."
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
"Now it's business," states Bareman, after admitting to winding up Whittaker supporters, "That fun behaviour when we had time to have that, stops."
Adesanya has comfortably defended his belt three times since he fought Whittaker, with his only UFC loss coming from a step up in weight-class to take on the light-heavyweight champion at the time, Jan Blachowicz. Whittaker has since pointed to the Blachowicz fight as setting a blueprint on how to beat Adesanya.
But Bareman believes a smart team would approach previous losses with caution, "because I know that's the one fight that fighter has studied and filled all those gaps up completely".
"So you perhaps are going to be running into something that you think is a weakness, that has actually become one of their strengths. They must know that, they must know that."
Whittaker's team is a very smart team, said Bareman, "I don't expect them to lean on some of the mistakes Israel did in his fights that he's lost previously".
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
City Kickboxing teammates Carlos Ulberg and Blood Diamond are also fighting at UFC 271 this weekend in Houston, Texas. "The energy in this camp is just second to none. We've had fun," said Adesanya. "It's brothers in arms … it's a force that can't be broken. It's just history. There's moments that me and Carlos and me and Bloods have had where we just look at each other and feel that moment. It's some gladiator shit."
Going into the rematch, Bareman said their team is quietly confident, "We managed to beat Rob very convincingly, straying away from a very intricate game plan that we thought would be very effective … and still managed to have a dominating win. Given that we never used that game plan we can still enact it, really. Plus add to it. That's what we've done."
"We've brought back some old weapons and some new weapons," confirms Adesanya. "So, he's f****d bro. I'm not even lying. He's f****d."
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
