Dricus Du Plessis wants to know what the hold up is with the UFC announcing his next fight.
While nothing has been officially confirmed, it’s expected that Du Plessis will defend the UFC middleweight title against Israel Adesanya in Perth, Australia on August 18th at UFC 305. Du Plessis has heavily implied that’s what’s happening. Adesanya has done the same.
Yet for some reason the UFC refuses to confirm the fight to fans … or “Stillknocks,” apparently.
“I’m in, I’ve agreed to everything, I’m ready,” Du Plessis said in an interview with FightWave. “That’s the fight I want. I called him out after winning the belt, and that’s the fight the fans want to see. Let’s just announce this thing.”
“I don’t know what’s the hold up,” the middleweight champ continued. “I want it to be announced, I want it to go if that’s it. I said yes, 100 percent. I don’t know from his side, I don’t know what the story is, what the hold up is. Maybe UFC’s waiting for something, I’m not sure.”
“I’ve agreed to it. If they phoned me today and said, ‘We’re doing the Sean Strickland second fight,’ I’ll be, ‘Great, let’s do it.’ If they say no, we’re gonna wait and do the Khamzat [Chimaev] fight, great. I don’t make the fights. I said I’ll be ready to fight in May. I was ready to fight from then on. I just wasn’t ready for UFC 300.”
With both Du Plessis and Adesanya preparing for UFC 305, we only have two possibilities as to why there’s a delay. First, there could be unresolved issues regarding Adesanya’s pay. “The Last Stylebender” is no longer champion, and that means he normally wouldn’t get pay-per-view points for his fight. His managers could be holding out in order to get more money out of the UFC.
The other possibility? The UFC just isn’t ready to announce the Perth event’s headline fight. There’s an order and schedule to these things, and card gets officially announced when the UFC says they get announced.
But that wouldn’t explain why Du Plessis still doesn’t know who he’ll end up fighting, or if he’ll end up waiting for Khamzat Chimaev, who headlines the UFC’s debut event in Saudi Arabia on June 22nd. It’s one thing to hold back an announcement to the public, and quite another to leave your champion in the dark.
