Alexander Volkanovski is sharing more thoughts on his second round KO loss to Ilia Topuria, including accusations he returned too quickly from an October head kick loss to Islam Makhachev.
Four months isn’t a long time to recover from a devastating knockout, and many felt he came back too soon to fight Topuria. A few more months, and maybe that killshot against the cage wouldn’t have put a fresher Volkanovski down. At the very least, “The Great” says it would have given him more confidence in his ability to take a punch.
“People are gonna speculate and say ‘He’s chinny, it wasn’t a long enough break,”’ Volkanovski said on his YouTube channel. “Look, I think my team did a great job but you know what, it was on my mind, yeah. I told myself it would be, that’s what I mean that I was of two minds in there. I was fighting like ‘I can’t get caught,’ but trying to tell myself ‘You’re all good, start fighting your fight!’ So it was a tricky one.”
“Maybe it did [affect me],” he admitted. “That makes me take this seriously, obviously it’s two in a row now. I’m not planning on having a quick turnaround like I did after that October fight with Islam. The few months between the two fights, some people are gonna say it was a bad idea. Again, I thought we did everything right but maybe there was something there.”
Alexander “The Great” looked pretty good in the first round, which he won on many fans’ scorecards. But he wasn’t happy with the performance.
“Was it absolutely terrible? Probably not,” he said. “But did I feel like myself in there? No, not really. I think it’s probably clear to most people that I didn’t look myself in there, and there’s a few things that could come into play with that.”
“I feel like I was fighting to not get caught, you know? And that’s just not my style.”
This story originally appeared on MMA Mania
