Joe Lopez and Alexander Volkanovski were surprised Islam Makhachev wasn’t as strong as they expected.
Featherweight champion Volkanovski (25-2 MMA, 12-1 UFC) took lightweight champ Makhachev (24-1 MMA, 13-1 UFC) to the brink in their superfight, which headlined UFC 284. But ultimately, he fell short in a decision loss.
No one had been able to stop Makhachev’s grappling prowess, and with Volkanovski moving a weight class up to challenge Makhachev, the odds weren’t in his favor. But as Volkanovski vowed he would, he constantly got back up and Makhachev struggled to control him on the ground.
“Islam had this stigma about him as like the boogeyman – he’s very super strong, all these things about him,” Lopez told The AllStar. “Alex just debunked a whole lot, because I asked Alex in the third round, I said, ‘Is he strong?’ And he went, ‘No, he’s not strong. He doesn’t feel strong at all,’ And I went, ‘Well, take him down yourself.’
“I could see a lot of the times he was just hanging on, he wasn’t this super freaky strongish guy that everybody made out to be. If anything, Alex is a really super freaky strong guy. If he gets ahold of you, you know it.”
Makhachev won the fight by unanimous decision. Round 2 was perhaps the closest, but Makhachev was awarded that round by all three judges. Lopez admitted he initially thought Volkanovski lost that round, but after watching it back, he thinks he won it.
“We watched the fight back about two or three times and I actually thought Alex won – not only myself, but everyone that was in the room thought that Alex had won that second round,” Lopez said. “When I looked at it, I thought he got knocked down. But actually with the punch, he got caught. He got caught coming in and it just caught him off balance.”
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 284.
