Pound 4 Pound<\/a> podcast. \u201cThere\u2019s that face while he\u2019s trying to\u2014you see that face. \u2026 There\u2019s that face right when Islam gets that double. \u2026 There\u2019s that face of, \u2018I\u2019m trying to fight, but this dude can\u2019t freaking let me.\u2019 That right there is when you start to [makes breaking motion].\u201d<\/p>\nDella Maddalena made it to the bell, but his performance was disappointing, especially considering how he won the belt this past May when he earned a gutsy decision win over Belal Muhammad at UFC 315. There were few opportunities for Della Maddalena to show off his exciting striking here as he spent the majority of his bout on his back defending against Makhachev\u2019s attempt to pass his guard.<\/p>\n
Since Della Maddalena managed to keep his fight with Muhammad standing, there was a chance he could force Makhachev to engage him in similar fashion if he could stop takedowns. But Makhachev was relentless and Usman believes he has a strong chance to retain his title against the current crop of contenders.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew there was two directions that it was going to go,\u201d Usman said. \u201cI just didn\u2019t think this fight was going to be a long back-and-forth fight like myself and [Colby Covington] 1. I just knew that wasn\u2019t going to be the case for this. I thought either JDM somehow really has closed those gaps from the holes that he has to where he\u2019s able to step forward and start to do damage or Islam was going to do what I thought he was going to do. That\u2019s get him down, and when you get some of these guys down, we\u2019re able to float on these guys, we\u2019re able to just kind of be a step ahead of them in them trying to maneuver and create a scramble to get back to their feet, and that\u2019s what Islam did.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, come on. Nineteen minutes of control time. The only other time I\u2019ve seen that long right now in that welterweight division with these top guys, I would say my fight vs. [Joaquin] Buckley. Basically, this is how you stifle some of these new guys. I feel like there\u2019s a lot of\u2014not a lot\u2014but there\u2019s a JDM, there\u2019s a few JDMs in the welterweight division. Carlos Prates. [Michael] Morales, we haven\u2019t seen these guys go down to the ground. There\u2019s a few guys like that that are tough, gritty, heavy, hard-hitting strikers. But there is a way to potentially neutralize that striking and Islam did just that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Usman\u2019s co-host Henry Cejudo believes Makhachev could have finished him and if the two ever fight again, Makhachev will definitely push to end the fight inside the distance.<\/p>\n
However, Usman isn\u2019t so sure Della Maddalena can be put away so easily, even given how Saturday\u2019s fight went.<\/p>\n
\u201cI give [Della Maddalena] credit,\u201d Usman said. \u201cThere\u2019s a crop of guys now in this division that are just fearless, that don\u2019t care, they\u2019re willing to throw the kitchen sink and their dogs at you in order to potentially get you out of there with that one shot and JDM is one of those guys to where I think you can bend them, big time, I haven\u2019t seen him break. Because when they break, they make mistakes like turning, giving up their back so they can get out of the fight. \u2026 So I don\u2019t want to just shit on him and say, \u2018Oh yeah, he broke.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jack Della Maddalena\u2019s face told the story in the UFC 322 main event. \u201cJDM\u201d entered Saturday\u2019s pay-per-view show…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,82,640,702],"class_list":{"0":"post-292368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}