Brendan Allen keeps winning and he hopes his current upward trajectory leads to a long-awaited shot at revenge against UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland.<\/p>\n
Strickland defeated Allen in November 2020 in a 195-pound catchweight bout, and both have found great success since. Three years later, Strickland scored a shocking upset of Israel Adesanya to capture the 185-pound title, while Allen put together a seven-fight win streak that had him on the cusp of title contention himself.<\/p>\n
Allen has frequently called for a rematch with Strickland, who became two-time champion by defeating Khamzat Chimaev at UFC 328, and he continued that campaign after a thrilling win over Edmen Shahbazyan in Saturday\u2019s UFC Vegas 118 co-main event.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to say, I don\u2019t think I deserve anything,\u201d Allen said. \u201cI try to earn everything I get. I mean, f*ck, I hope Sean goes out here, he\u2019s the champion, so hopefully he picks me. Let\u2019s run this shit back. It\u2019s been six years since we fought, I think I was beating him going into it. If you watch our fight at different angles, you can tell he didn\u2019t hit me with the strike set, it wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I think I get him out of there now. I think Edmen\u2019s the better version of him. He\u2019s younger, he\u2019s more technical, he\u2019s faster, so I think Edmen\u2019s a better version of him and I think I get Sean out of there, and \u2018And New.\u2019 But you never know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Allen has won his past three fights, including an upset of top 10-ranked Reinier de Ridder in the main event of UFC Vancouver this past October. That upset thrust Allen into the thick of the middleweight title mix, along with the likes of Nassourdine Imavov, Caio Borralho, and Chimaev, who may seek an immediate rematch with Strickland.<\/p>\n
If a second Strickland fight eludes him again, Allen has some idea of how his 2026 could play out, including potentially fighting the winner of a rumored Dricus du Plessis vs. Kamaru Usman matchup.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf not, let me and Nassourdine fight,\u201d Allen said. \u201cIf Nassourdine wants to sit out and wait, that\u2019s fine, let me fight the winner of Usman and Dricus in October, maybe early November at the worst, so we\u2019ll see. Right now I\u2019m going to go get these injuries checked, I\u2019m going to talk with Hunter and we\u2019ll see what\u2019s next.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Allen\u2019s favor is his reputation for putting on exciting fights. He has won three Performance of the Night bonuses and has been one half of the Fight of the Night in two of his past three fights.<\/p>\n
While he may not be able to match Strickland\u2019s methodical and highly effective fighting style, he\u2019s confident that his persistence makes him worthy of a title shot.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Shahbazyan] had a good game plan, play on the back foot, work the counter game, but like my coach said, if we can\u2019t take him down, we\u2019re going to beat him standing up,\u201d Allen said. \u201cSometimes you\u2019ve just got to be a dog and walk him, that\u2019s what I did, I walked him down. Walk him down, that\u2019s what I was doing.<\/p>\n
\u201cSean won off of standing on his back foot and throwing a jab, but I\u2019m going to give you some power shots. I\u2019m going to make it dirty. \u2026 It was fun, I hope everyone enjoyed it. That\u2019s what I come to do. I come to fight, win or lose, I\u2019m coming to fight. I guess I\u2019m not the most likeable guy, I don\u2019t got the most followers or none of that, but I can f*cking fight. I\u2019m 15-4 in this promotion, I\u2019ve fought the best guys I can fight.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brendan Allen keeps winning and he hopes his current upward trajectory leads to a long-awaited shot at revenge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":["post-723763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723763","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=723763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}