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Sean Strickland’s head coach, Eric Nicksick, is confident in his pupil’s ability to recognise and address the issues that led to him losing his middleweight belt to Dorricus du Plessis at UFC 297 in January.
Nicksick on Submission Radio preparing to face Paulo Costa: “For example, I didn’t use kicks or teeps. I think you and I actually talked about this, but teeps are three or four things we needed to counter the pressure and slow Dricus down with bodywork, but we also needed to give the judges another scoring criterion, not just the jab. On the ground, there were some things we could have done better. For example, every time we got up, Sean would often switch and be in a position to do topside damage, but he just got up and ran away. So there were some moments where we could have won some scoring criteria, given the judges more information and made it look more favorable for us.”
“A few weeks ago, I said something to Sean when we were sparring, and I could see that it really resonated with him. He was winning every round. He won round one, round two, round three. He was winning everything. But I said to him before the fifth round, ‘Hey, you’re sparring like you fought Dricus. You fought Dricus not to lose. I want you to fight like you fought Izzy. You had nothing to lose. You had nothing to lose against Izzy. He fought differently than Izzy. I said he lost to Dricus because he didn’t have that edge that I always see from him. So in round four and five, he knocked out the last two guys. That’s what I want from him,'” Nicksick added.
Nicksick also revealed what he expects from his fighter ahead of this weekend’s five-round co-main event match against Costa.
“Five rounds [bout,] I think that’s definitely in our favor. At least right now the mentality is, we’re going to drag this guy deep. So hopefully we can drag him out of there by the fourth or fifth round. But this guy is tough. He’s tenacious and durable, but we’re just going to have to chip away at him. So that’s the goal. I’m not trying to make predictions, I’m just telling our athletes what we expect from them.”
