Caio Borralho saw a lot of mistakes in Khamzat Chimaev’s dominant decision victory over Dricus Du Plessis at UFC 319.
‘Borz’ controlled Du Plessis for more than 21 minutes in their five-round title tilt, securing his 15th career victory and becoming the UFC’s newly minted middleweight world champion.
While Chimaev’s performance was hailed as one of the most impressive in UFC title fight history, Borralho couldn’t help but look at the slew of mistakes on the part of Du Plessis.
“In the first takedown of the fight, he just tried to do a guillotine, but no timing guillotine. How are you going to hug a guy that wants to hug you? So there were a lot of mistakes besides the crucifix,” the Fighting Nerds co-founder told Submission Radio.
“Before going to crucifix, he was on guard and he didn’t know how to do guard retention. Like Chimaev did a normal guard pass, like a white belt guard pass, and [Du Plessis] didn’t know how to do guard retention. And after that, when the crucifix happened, I think there were a lot of mistakes on his part. He stayed too flat on the striking. He didn’t faint. He didn’t move at all. He didn’t do any kind of footwork to make Khamzat work harder to shoot a takedown.”
Caio Borralho, among others, is already lining up for a shot at the UFC’s newest champ
Du Plessis and his coach have already vowed to go back to the drawing board and come back for a rematch even stronger. Unfortunately, the South African sensation may be waiting a while with the middleweight queue filling up fast.
On September 6, Borralho will return to the Octagon for a potential title eliminator against the division’s top-ranked contender, Nassourdine Imavov.
That, on top of a recently announced clash between Reinier de Ridder and Anthony Hernandez at UFC Vancouver, could produce Chimaev’s first official challenger.
