loss to Lerone Murphy in his debut at UFC 319<\/a>.<\/p>\n“He’s a fantastic fighter. He’s really great \u2013\u00a0so much so that Bellator signed him before he even made his debut,” Freire told MMA Junkie of Pico through an interpreter. “There was all this hype around him. I saw his fights, I saw his debut, and he’s great.<\/p>\n
“He’s strong, he’s athletic, he has a lot of gifts as a fighter, but he has a fatal flaw which is whenever he gets hit with a hard shot, he goes down. So that’s something I’m hoping to exploit when we fight each other. That’s his weak spot. But aside from that, he’s a great fighter.”<\/p>\n
Advertisement<\/p>\n
Freire and Pico almost crossed paths when they were both under the Bellator and PFL banners, but a fight never materialized. Now, they’ll get to fight as a part of the UFC.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know exactly what their thought process was, how this came up for the UFC,” Freire said. “I’ve always told them from the start that I’d fight anybody. Ever since I first signed with them, even before I signed with them, and I’ve asked for many names, and I’ve heard many names, but there’s something different here compared to Bellator.<\/p>\n
“Everyone was willing to fight (at Bellator). Everyone wanted to fight. Here, the guys keep hiding themselves behind the rankings. So I’m willing to fight anyone from the top to the bottom, but the guys here don’t think the same way. I think the UFC saw an opportunity to put together this fight that never happened in Bellator and people were interested in seeing it back then.”<\/p>\n
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Patricio Freire plans to exploit ‘fatal flaw’ in Aaron Pico’s game<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Patricio Freire wants to test Aaron Pico’s chin at UFC 327. Former Bellator double champion Freire (37-8 MMA,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[4972,64,63,786,785,3169,6403,85,787],"class_list":["post-539836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-aaron-pico","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-mma-junkie","tag-patricio-freire","tag-sports","tag-ufc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539836","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=539836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}