“Oliveira’s the difficult match-up”- Alexander Volkanovski’s coach hails Charles Oliveira as the toughest test for his pupil
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Charles Oliveira and Alexander Volkanovski
Alexander Volkanovski’s coach speaks out on his possible move to the lightweight division! UFC 274 was an absolute blockbuster event. The PPV card was headlined by the fan-favorite, Brazil’s own, Charles Oliveira. Oliveira was set to defend his belt against Justin Gaethje in the main event but for the first time in history, a UFC champion was stripped of his title owing to failed weigh-ins.
Oliveira ahead of the fight could not make the championship weight of 155.5 pounds. The fighter came in 0.5 pounds overweight for his second title defense, leading to him losing his belt to the weight scale. Despite getting the win against Justin Gaethje at UFC 274, Charles would not have a title defense to his name due to the weigh-in mishap.
UFC’s featherweight champion, Alexander Volkanovski is another champion who is running through everyone in his division, after his last win against The Korean Zombie, he expressed interest in moving up to the lightweight division. Volkanovski’s assistant coach, Eugene Bareman spoke to Submission Radio about this move, and he said the champ is pretty serious about this.
“I don’t think the fight is necessary”- Eugene Bareman speaks out on the third fight between Alexander Volkanovski and Max Holloway
Bareman sees Volkanovski easily beating most of the lightweights, but the one that’d pose a challenge to him would be Charles Oliveira. He said, “Definitely Oliveira’s the more difficult match-up in my opinion. It just depends. Oliveira has a more well-rounded skillset, so there’s more to deal with.”
Comparing his skills to Makhachev, he said, “Islam’s got good stand-up, but that just depends on who you are looking in, I guess. But yeah, I just think Oliveira would be a more well-rounded skillset for Volk to deal with. Whereas Islam, perhaps we could narrow a couple of things down and concentrate on those few things. Which is easier said than done, because just like in much the fashion of Khabib, Islam excels. He may only do one or two aspects of the sport really, really well, but he does them at the highest level. So, that’s the difficulty.”
Volkanovski is now set to face Max Holloway in a trilogy fight, but Eugene believes the fight is not really necessary, “Personally, I don’t think the fight is necessary at all. But, Max has done really well and showed why he’s a champion. So, even though I don’t think the fight necessarily needs to happen cause we’ve already won twice, I’m not against it happening again. It’s another good challenge, and if it’s what the people want to see, let’s give it to them.”
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Suryansh Thakur
(1600 Articles Published)