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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
"I think I focus on it so much, I focus on their strengths so much that I almost adapt it. I become so familiar with what they're good at that I just almost adapt it into my psychology, into my skillset, and then subconsciously it just starts playing out in the fight. Doing what they do. I will try to wrestle Daniel Cormier. I definitely plan on making him work extremely hard for any takedowns he's going for, and I'm definitely going to be looking for takedowns myself. I'm more than capable of taking him down, and I believe in my top game. So I'll definitely look to attack Daniel at his strengths, and weaknesses."
-UFC Champ Jon Jones talks to Shaun Al-Shatti at MMAFighting.com about taking on Daniel Cormier where the challenger is best at UFC 182.
Penick's Analysis: There's a lot more from Jones, his coach Greg Jackson, and more on this topic in Al-Shatti's full piece, I encourage everyone to check out the link. As to the topic at hand here, this is very much in line with what we've seen from Jones in the past. He's a very unique competitor in that regard. We've seen fighters take advantage of weaknesses in their opponents plenty of times - Georges St-Pierre was a master at that. But Jones absolutely has beaten people with their own game. That's what we saw him do against Lyoto Machida, Chael Sonnen, Alexander Gustafsson, etc. He did to his opponents what they wanted to do to him, and he succeeded greatly in doing so. Can he have that same success trying to out-wrestle Cormier? That one's more questionable, but if it's used for a time to throw Cormier off to open things up later in the fight, it could be extremely effective. There's less than two weeks until we get to find out either way!
[Jon Jones art by Grant Gould (c) MMATorch.com]
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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