Robert Whittaker won’t comment on the rumors he was dealing with a significant injury going into his UFC 290 fight against Dricus Du Plessis.
Ben Askren and Daniel Cormier recently spoke on ‘DC’s’ YouTube channel and both mentioned they heard Whittaker had a serious ankle injury going into that fight. However, Whittaker says he won’t comment on if that was true, but does admit the training camp for his fight against Du Plessis wasn’t one he was happy with.
“I’m not going to go in it, no fighter goes into a fight 100 percent. Overall, I wasn’t super happy with the camp and the preparation leading into it, it wasn’t optimal for myself. Everything is 20-20 in hindsight, it’s easy to point at those things and pick at those things after the fact,” Robert Whittaker told BJPENN.com on Tuesday.
When asked what went wrong in the training camp, Whittaker says it was just the way he was doing things. But, he feels very prepared now after learning what he did wrong in his training camp for Dricus Du Plessis.
“Just the way I was doing things. I wanted to focus on different things, I took away some aspects from the last camp and implemented them into this camp,” Whittaker said. “I don’t know, I’m very happy with the result now. The camp is more or less done, just tightening the bolts, keeping the blood moving this week. I’m very happy with the place I’m at now and very happy with the form that I’m coming into to fight Costa.”
Despite the loss to Dricus Du Plessis, Robert Whittaker still has full confidence that he can beat the South African and is eager for them to rematch in the future.
“The biggest takeaway from that fight is maybe I underestimated him, maybe I just underestimated him a little bit, maybe I wasn’t ready for the type of fight he was going to bring… Dricus is on a list of rematches that I want. I do believe I beat him nine times out of 10, it was just his night, the fact that he has the title will make that all the sweeter,” Whittaker said.
“I feel like in that fight against Dricus, I didn’t get to display what I could do, I feel like I didn’t turn up on that night. If you look at the fight and the way I was performing, I wasn’t really fighting like myself, at my full potential,” Whittaker added. “I don’t want this to turn me to taking stuff away from Dricus, he did turn up and he beat me and that’s all that matters, but in my heart, I want to run that back. I have something to prove there.”
If Whittaker is going to get a rematch with Du Plessis, he will first need to beat Paulo Costa next weekend at UFC 298 in Anaheim.
