Dricus du Plessis has a lot of training to do if he wants to beat Khamzat Chimaev.
It took the former UFC champion 10 fights in the Octagon for someone to finally figure him out, that being the undefeated Khamzat Chimaev.
Du Plessis suffered his first UFC loss via unanimous decision after Chimaev outwrestled him for five rounds in the main event of UFC 319 weeks ago.
After the title loss, the former champion has said his comeback will be ‘unimaginable for the average-minded’.
On Submission Radio, du Plessis’ head coach Morné Visser claimed they’ll need six months to address the mistakes made against Chimaev and work more on their grappling to win a potential rematch.
A former champion thinks it’s gonna take more than that to dethrone a fighter as skilled as Chimaev.
Dominick Cruz says Khamzat Chimaev and Dricus du Plessis ‘looked like two completely different level fighters’
Dominick Cruz was recently asked about du Plessis potentially joining him as a two-time champion.
Cruz, a UFC fighter-turned-analyst, commented on du Plessis’ chances in a rematch against Chimaev.
“He says six months [of training], I’ll fill some gaps. But, when I look at that, that’s not six months,” Cruz said on the Anik & Florian Podcast.
“He didn’t separate one time, like, nothing, right?” Cruz said of the grappling exchanges in du Plessis vs. Chimaev.
“He’s just never been put on his back that long, I don’t think. And you have to have an offense from the bottom in order to get up. If your job, when you get taken down is just to get up and escape, that’s kind of defensive in a way. So, if you’re on the bottom and you’re getting held down, you have to have some sort of offensive attack from the bottom.
“Like, you need to go for a single-leg [takedown]. You need to be able to be off balance to get to a double leg, create space, get to a front headlock. And then you have to create some sort of offense from the bottom, some sort of attack, so that the person on top of you stops blanketing you.
“He couldn’t really create that,” Cruz said of du Plessis.
“When you look at the differential in that particular fight, it just looked like two completely different level fighters. Because the separation wasn’t there.
“Now, I could say if DDP got away one time, I would have a totally different thing to say. But he didn’t. And he couldn’t. He couldn’t get away once. He couldn’t separate once…”
Khamzat Chimaev might be out for the rest of the year
Following Chimaev’s title win earlier this month, there was talk of the champion returning to fight at UFC 321 on Oct. 25 in Abu Dhabi.
#5-ranked contender Reinier de Ridder obliged to fight Chimaev in a quick turnaround, however, ‘RDR’ and Anthony Hernandez have been booked to face each other at UFC Vancouver on Oct. 18.
Also in the title discussion are Nassourdine Imavov and Caio Borralho. The top middleweights headline UFC Paris on Sept. 6.
With these matchups on deck, there’s a possibility Chimaev doesn’t fight again in 2025.