Hablemos MMA<\/a> in Spanish. “It’s the No. 1 fight, No. 1. The other one was Jon Jones vs. Tom Aspinall \u2013\u00a0that was No. 1. But right now, if Islam wins, the No. 1 fight to make is Topuria vs. Islam.”<\/p>\nMakhachev vacated his UFC lightweight title earlier this year, and is expected to challenge UFC welterweight champion Jack Della Maddalena in the coming months. No official date or location has been announced by the UFC. Should Makhachev become a two-division UFC champion, just like Topuria did in June, Mendez would love to see a clash between the two \u2013 whether it’s at 155 or 170 pounds.<\/p>\n
“La Leyenda” has been very vocal about wanting to fight Makhachev and has chased him for some time now. He’s also made some bold claims, saying he could submit Makhachev, who’s one of the most dominant grappler’s MMA has ever seen.<\/p>\n
Some would be bothered by Topuria’s comments, but Mendez very much likes what’s going on.<\/p>\n
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“I like what he’s been doing,” Mendez said. “He’s doing a good job at getting people to want to watch the fight. The more Ilia does, the more people want to see this fight. I like everything he’s doing as a fighter. He’s very strong and doesn’t care about the weight. I think now it’s a great fight for us. The first thing Islam wanted was a legacy fight \u2013\u00a0he wanted the welterweight title. Now if we win the welterweight title, we can go down or he can come up. That’s what I say, but if the UFC doesn’t like it, it’s not happening. But first we need to win.”<\/p>\n
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Coach: Islam Makhachev vs. Ilia Topuria ‘No. 1 fight to make’ in UFC<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The building blocks for a potential super fight between Islam Makhachev and Ilia Topuria are being put in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,17500,786,17499,27140,38927,38928,785,3169,85,38929,787],"class_list":["post-44599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-charles-oliveira","tag-fighting","tag-ilia-topuria","tag-islam-makhachev","tag-javier-mendez","tag-makhachev","tag-mma","tag-mma-junkie","tag-sports","tag-super-fight","tag-ufc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44599","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=44599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}