Former UFC champion Sean Strickland believes he\u2019s the man to beat Khamzat Chimaev, and he plans on working his way back into the middleweight title picture to prove it.<\/p>\n
Khamzat Chimaev seized the 185 pound strap from Dricus du Plessis, blanking the South African champ<\/a> on the scorecards and even earning a 10-8 with his relentless grappling offense. Du Plessis was the man who took the belt off Strickland in 2024, but \u201cTarzan\u201d isn\u2019t worried about what the MMA math implies.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m probably the only one in the UFC that can out grapple that little wh*re for 5 rounds,\u201d Strickland wrote on X (formerly Twitter) after Chimaev\u2019s win. \u201cWell looks like I gotta stack some Ws to fight that little b*tch lmao.\u201d<\/p>\n Chimaev just laughed when he heard about Strickland\u2019s comments. The two had previously trained together at XTreme Couture, and both claimed they dominated the other.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cBro, I take him down many times, how can he take me down?\u201d Khamzat said at the UFC 319 post-fight press conference. \u201cCome on, this guy. I beat him everywhere and striking. This guy just talk too much. So he\u2019s a funny guy. He\u2019s working with that.\u201d<\/p>\n Strickland has been training with another one of Chimaev\u2019s rivals in Paulo Costa, and \u201cBorz\u201d had an interesting suggestion on how they could resolve things.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s training with \u2018Buratino\u2019 or whatever it is. Yeah, Paulo. I [beat] them together.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, Chimaev has a lot of potential opponents for his first title defense. There\u2019s the winner of UFC Paris\u2019 Caio Borralho vs. Nassourdine Imavov fight. There\u2019s Reinier de Ridder.<\/a> There\u2019s even Anthony \u201cFluffy\u201d Hernandez.<\/a> As for Strickland, he\u2019s suspended indefinitely<\/a> for getting in the cage at a local event and punching a fighter. That\u2019s not exactly striking distance from the title, is it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former UFC champion Sean Strickland believes he\u2019s the man to beat Khamzat Chimaev, and he plans on working…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,51993,785,85,51992,1396],"class_list":{"0":"post-75776","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-full-results","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc-319-du-plessis-vs-chimaev-start-time","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75776","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=75776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}