Vettori: Blachowicz Proved Adesanya Is A Useless Quitter On The Ground

Marvin Vettori thinks Israel Adesanya has a massive weakness in his ground game.

Vettori will be challenging current UFC middleweight champion Adesanya in hopes of dethroning the “The Last Stylebender” at UFC 263 on June 12th. The Italian has high hopes of exploiting what he recognises as Adesanya’s Achilles heel: his ground game, which Vettori saw prominently especially in Adesanya’s last fight in which he failed to become two weight world champion losing to Jan Blachowicz at UFC 259 back in March.

“For me, it’s relevant, but it just proved a lot of things that I already knew,” Vettori told Mike Swick on the “Real Quick with Mike Swick” podcast. “People pictured him like the Mayweather of MMA, and he’s not. He’s not. Jan was doing a great job defensively and then he was able to take him down again. People were picturing him like this phenom. He’s good, but he gets hit, and he misses a lot of shots, and he gets taken down. I can do all of that.”

Vettori believes Adesanya quits when he gets taken down and has worse jiu-jitsu than his last opponent, Kevin Holland whom he comfortably defeated by repeatedly taking down Holland. With this in mind, “The Italian Dream” will undoubtedly be confident in doing the same to Adesanya as he did with Holland which is to take a heavy grappling approach to the middleweight champion.

“With Jan, the last time he got taken down, he kind of quit,” Vettori said. “He was just laying there. Adesanya, when it comes to the middle of the cage, when he’s taken down in the middle of the cage and he doesn’t have the cage, he’s pretty useless on the floor to be honest. Kevin Holland is a better jiu-jitsu player than Adesanya for sure. Even when Adesanya said, and I made fun of it because even after the Blachowicz fight he was like, ‘I was trying to go for deep half.’

“I’m like, what the f**k are you talking about. There was no attempt to go to deep half. That shows you don’t know what deep half is, and I know exactly what deep half is, because I’ve been training with (Fabricio) Werdum. I actually used deep half in my Roberson fight. I used it successfully. His game and the way he fights, because he scrambles hard the moment you try to take him down next to the cage, but yeah definitely when he’s down, he’s pretty useless to be honest.”

Vettori is not the only middleweight who saw a possible chink in Adesanya’s armor. Former UFC middleweight champion, Chris Weidman also recognized this and believed himself to be Adesanya’s worst matchup if they were ever to fight. Jack Hermansson also came to the same conclusion with the same evidence provided by Blachowicz.

At UFC 263, Vettori will gain a chance to win the belt but also rewrite the loss he had against Adesanya back in April 2018 when they were both up-and-coming prospects. In their first bout, Adesanya got the better of Vettori with a razor close split decision. The Italian has not lost since and has gone on a five fight winning streak beating the likes of Karl Robertson, Jack Hermansson and most recently against Kevin Holland.

How do you fancy Marvin Vettori’s chances against Israel Adesanya? Do you think the grappling will play a major key in their fight?