Movsar Evloev isn’t buying the idea that Alexander Volkanovski is walking into Abu Dhabi as the best version of himself. With their featherweight title fight headlining UFC 333 on October 24, the undefeated contender said in an interview with UFC on Paramount that the champion’s attention has been split all camp, because Volkanovski spent months trying to get Mauricio Ruffy ready for someone else’s fight.
“I hope when he talks like that, he believes he’s talking because he was (too) focused on Ruffy’s camp, he better focus on his own camp,” Evloev said, responding to Volkanovski’s prediction of a career-best performance.
The Ruffy connection is where this gets pointed. Volkanovski had been training with the Brazilian striker ahead of Ruffy’s recent fight against Arman Tsarukyan, and that night ended with Ruffy brutally knocked out. Afterward, Volkanovski said he regretted that Ruffy didn’t get more time to prepare. Evloev’s read is simple: a coach-brain champion is a distracted champion, and he thinks it’ll show on fight night.
He didn’t go full disrespect, though. Evloev called Volkanovski a great fighter and one of the best featherweights ever, then flipped that into fuel.
“Of course he’s a great fighter, he’s one of the best featherweight’s in history, but that gives me more motivation to prove I’m not fake and I’m here to win the belt and be champion for as long as I can,” he said.
The 25-minute problem
This matchup took a while to get booked. Volkanovski, 38, has been campaigning for Evloev for some time, even with the UFC pushing back on the idea. Now he gets the 32-year-old Russian across the cage in a five-round main event.
The big storyline heading in is whether Evloev’s wrestling can carry him for 25 minutes. Volkanovski has said the challenger can’t just hold him down for five rounds, pointing to his fight with Islam Makhachev as the only time anyone narrowly beat him across that full distance. Evloev has also heard the line that he’ll need a finish to take the belt.
He disagrees on both counts. “My wrestling is different, my takedowns are different, I’ve got good timing,” Evloev said, adding that he’ll take Volkanovski down as long as needed, for the full 25 minutes, even if he can’t keep him there. He also claimed his hands have improved, and he had a blunt assessment of the champion’s striking: “he’s not that special so I will await his striking and won’t just jump into the wrestling.”
That last part is the sentence I’ll be thinking about on October 24. Evloev’s whole career has been built on making people carry his weight, so him saying he’ll wait on Volkanovski’s striking is either a real evolution or the kind of thing fighters say in fight week and forget once the first right hand lands. The Ruffy jab is fair game as trash talk, but I’d be careful leaning on it. A guy who spends his downtime coaching other people is usually a guy who never stops thinking about fighting, and that’s a strange thing to call a weakness. If Evloev wants that belt in Abu Dhabi, he’ll have to take it off a champion who asked for this fight by name.
