Former UFC lightweight champion Khabib – who retired in 2020 after winning all 29 of his fights – has referred to Davis as a “dangerous fighter”.<\/p>\n
The Briton says he is unsure if Khabib is praising him to hype up the bout or to ground Nurmagomedov – who he describes as an “arrogant individual”.<\/p>\n
“I’ve had it before – if you’re over confident you underperform, so I think Khabib is trying to make Usman not as confident,” said Davis.<\/p>\n
“Equally, it is good to get praise from Khabib.”<\/p>\n
Davis beat Rabadanov by landing the more damaging strikes when the fighters were on their feet, but spent the best part of two rounds being out-wrestled.<\/p>\n
Although Nurmagomedov opts to strike more than many of his team-mates and coaches, Davis is expecting him to rely on his Dagestan-famed grappling.<\/p>\n
“He’s very tricky, he’s quite a puzzle. It’s been a thinking camp,” said Davis.<\/p>\n
“Some fighters you have to work harder for. With him I’ve had to really study what he does and work out counters for it.<\/p>\n
“I’ve had to think about what he could do, but equally remind myself he’s only human.”<\/p>\n
Like the fight against Rabadanov, Davis is going into the bout as a heavy underdog but it’s a position he thrives in.<\/p>\n
“People feel like Gadzhi lost the fight and I didn’t win it, but if you watch it back it’s not that at all – he was trying to win but couldn’t,” said Davis.<\/p>\n
“I think that’s what’s going to happen on Saturday.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former UFC lightweight champion Khabib – who retired in 2020 after winning all 29 of his fights –…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":464116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85],"class_list":["post-464115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464115","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=464115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/464116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}