In his return to action in Abu Dhabi this past August, Cory Sandhagen’s three-fight winning streak came to an end. “The Sandman” has been one of the top contenders at bantamweight for a long time but in his latest outing, a new major threat emerged with his biggest win to date.
The undefeated Umar Nurmagomedov was able to skyrocket up the 135-pound rankings by decisively beating Sandhagen in the main event on August 3. The cousin of Khabib Nurmagomedov showed that he isn’t just a threat on the ground by standing and striking with his opponent for long stretches in the fight.
During a recent appearance on the JAXXON Podcast, he recapped the fight and where he believes he went wrong in his preparations. Sandhagen was able to compete with Nurmagomedov in the grappling exchanges after putting a lot of time into his wrestling throughout his training camp.
However, as a result, he encountered a problem that many fighters have when going up against a wrestling specialist. In his opinion, he became so focused on this aspect of the fight that it negatively impacted his striking which is where you’d imagine him to hold an advantage in this match-up.
He found that grappling with his opponent wasn’t the issue that he had, taking advantage of the time they spent standing was. Sandhagen was happy to learn from this fight but admitted that the narrative surrounding his opponent’s dominant grappling played a major factor inside the Octagon.
“I grappled a ton, I was wrestling a lot. Just the normal s*** man like I really thought that I would have a little bit more of a edge in the striking but should have done a little bit more striking and a little bit less wrestling because the wrestling, I kind of overestimated him big time on that. Everyone talks about how strong the Dagestani guys are and stuff and I had a little bit of that swirling around in my head so I overdid that I think a little bit.”
