For the first time in his MMA career, Israel Adesanya finds himself coming off the back of consecutive defeats inside the Octagon.
This doesn't tell the story of both the fights that took place a year apart, because though he didn't get his hand raised on either occasion, the story of the fights were completely different.
"The Last Stylebender" didn't look himself at UFC 293 where he was shockingly upset by Sean Strickland before taking a year off to return at UFC 305.
Despite not reclaiming the title against Dricus Du Plessis, Adesanya appeared somewhat back to where he was before and looked to be gaining momentum in the fight until Du Plessis was able to capitalize on a few mistakes to earn a submission win in the fourth round.
Adesanya's head coach at City Kickboxing, Eugene Bareman, gave his thoughts on the fight during a recent interview with Combat TV.
He came away feeling a lot more positive after this loss compared to the one from last year because they were able to learn from clear and obvious mistakes that will only lead to improvements, unlike UFC 293 which left the team scratching their heads.
He made some mistakes which you can only, in my opinion, put down to fatigue and the fatigue, you can put down to the work that Dricus was able to do so you can't do nothing but applaud that. It was a loss but you know, it was a good loss. Me and Israel can walk away from that loss and it's measurable, it's tangible. You can put that down, this is why this happened, this is why that happened. The Strickland fight is just a bit unexplainable to us. That's much harder to get over cuz it's like well what happened there.
Eugene Bareman Gives Credit To Dricus Du Plessis For An Aspect Of His Game That They 'Didn't Anticipate'
Bareman agrees with the common consensus that heading into the fourth round, it looked like the momentum was swinging towards Adesanya in the later rounds.
However, it was Du Plessis' finishing ability that ended up deciding the fight after he was able to wobble the former champion on the feet and take his back for the rear-naked choke win.
As he previously stated above, Bareman puts these crucial mistakes down to Adesanya being fatigued and while this is something they worked on during his training camp, the City Kickboxing boss revealed that he was surprised by how effectively the champion is able to weaponize his conditioning.
He said that Du Plessis may not be a perfect fighter but he's always making his opponents work hard to try and capitalize on his weaknesses.
It looks like he has some holes in his defense, he also makes you work to take advantage of those holes, you know what I mean. It's tough work out there. Yeah, the holes are there but it's tough work to find them and it just fatigued Israel and fatigued Israel and fatigued Israel and it slowly, slowly got to Israel to the point where he was so fatigued, Dricus was able to take advantage of it. That was probably something I didn't anticipate happening as much as it did and I just had an expectation that Israel would be able to push through that.