“People sometimes want something that is not possible. Georges St. Pierre for instance, plays by the rules, once you lose people don’t want to know about you anymore. It’s great to make a good show, if you can do both things, great, but you can’t always. Each day that goes by you keep seeing it as a sequence of losses because you keep distancing yourself to the title.”
“It’s best to keep a strategic fight and try to win because the level of the sport is so high. I can’t say ‘ok, let’s begin to exchange and see where it goes.’ We want to give a fight and give people a good show, but you have to play on a safety zone. Anderson Silva himself, in some of the fights he’s been doing, he does it to win, because he knows the consequences of the losses.”
“(In MMA counter-attacking) can be a bad thing for me, but in any other fighting sport, whether it’s Boxing or Muay Thai, there’s no such thing. The guy that attacks and the one that counter attacks have their credits, their shots. Where is there any good on walking forwards for five minutes and being hit 20 times? Only because you moved forwards it doesn’t mean you were effective. Sometimes it’s the wrong criteria to be used.”
“Until these days I hear everybody telling me, ‘(In the Quinton Jackson fight) they steal from you,’ but I don’t like to keep saying it because it ain’t change anything, maybe it make things worse because I’ll keep thinking about it. Now I’ll do my own game, win without leaving any doubts. These are things we learn on the road.”
— Check out the full interview with Lyoto Machida at Tatame.com.