could earn the winner<\/a> a fight against 185 pound champion Khamzat Chimaev. That talk dried up when \u201cFluffy\u201d withdrew and Allen stepped in, but Allen made his case for earning the title shot despite being 2-2 over his last four with decision losses to Hernandez and Imavov.<\/p>\n\u201cIf anyone wants to sit down and break down the tape and actually knows the Unified Rules of MMA \u2026 you can argue, for both of those, that I won both of those fights,\u201d Allen said. \u201cBut it is what it is. It\u2019s a loss on my record. I learned from it. Even though I think it was very close, I arguably won them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe I\u2019m delusional. Who knows? I don\u2019t really care. It\u2019s in the past. We\u2019re growing. We\u2019re learning. As I keep saying, I\u2019m still the youngest guy in the top 15 and now the top 5. I probably have the most fights out of all of them. This is my 18th fight in six years. I\u2019d say I\u2019m pretty active. I haven\u2019t fought slouches. I\u2019ve fought all top guys. If you look at everyone I\u2019ve fought in the moment I\u2019ve fought them, they were all top dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t need to talk too much to boast myself up,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not who I am. I let my record and my actions speak for themselves. I just come here, I get the job done, I give my best, I put on the best performance I can for the fans, for everyone, for the promotion. I step up and I\u2019m trying to be the face. I\u2019m trying to grow and be the best.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c\u201cThe division is stacked and growing even more stacked and I\u2019m still here at the top and I\u2019m still trying to reach that belt.\u201d<\/p>\n
If not a title, then Allen was open to facing longtime rival Dricus du Plessis.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, man,\u201d he said of a fight. \u201cIf that\u2019s what it is, if that\u2019s the timeline, because I don\u2019t know when he wants to return.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brendan Allen played spoiler on Saturday night, defeating Reinier de Ridder and dashing the Dutch fighter\u2019s plan of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225395,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85,1396],"class_list":{"0":"post-225394","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-mma","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225394\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}