It was an extremely long night for Dricus du Plessis at UFC 319 in Chicago. The former UFC middleweight champion lost his title to Khamzat Chimaev via a smothering so complete that the judges all awarded the fight to “Borz” with 50-44 scores. Control time for Chimaev? Over 21 minutes. Strikes landed? Over 500.
But there were a lot of Khamzat critics following the bout that complained about the new champ’s willingness to just hold an advantageous position and pitter-patter his way to another won round.
One of those critics is du Plessis coach Morne Visser, who had a lot of interesting things to say in a new interview with Submission Radio.
“It’s hard to take a big loss like this on the jaw, but lessons learned,” Visser said. “I think we could have done a lot better, but I also think the ref should have done better. You know what it’s like when you lose or something doesn’t go your way, you always wanna blame somebody else. But I do think the ref should have made that fight a lot more live or a little bit more live.”
Referee Marc Goddard has been getting it from both sides, half complaining that he stood the fight up too much and the other half complaining he didn’t stand it up enough. Visser plans to be prepared for this kind of ‘blanket’ fight in what he considers to be the inevitable rematch.
“There’s no way I’ll take a rematch with with us being a little bit behind in our Russian style of wrestling,” he said. That is what it is. Nothing else. He just knows how to control you on the floor … keeping the fight on the floor and making sure that the ref doesn’t stand it up. That’s all he did. Nothing else. We had more submission attempts and almost success. And, obviously, the stand up, we dominated him.”
There wasn’t a whole lot of stand up to point to because Chimaev implemented his wrestling game so completely and successfully. If du Plessis wants a chance against him, he’ll have to solve the wrestling issue. And Visser intends to make sure that happens.
I f—king hate losing, and Dricus hates, hates, hates losing,” the coach said. “His mindset is just, ‘We’re getting back.’ He’s gonna take a week off, and, we’ve got big plans. I’ve started already last night and this morning with our next big move, our plans to change and fix the problem.”
“What he did so well was he stayed on Dricus like a f—king blanket. So I’m looking for blankets. I’m looking for a lot of blankets around the world that’s gonna help us to get those blankets off us. So I realize and I recognize the mistakes.”
With the way du Plessis lost and the competitive state of the middleweight division, you wouldn’t expect a Khamzat rematch any time soon for DDP. But Visser is hoping to be back in there against the new champion in early 2026 — and he doesn’t want to fight anyone else.
“There’s obviously a lot of things happening in the middleweight division, but early next year,” he said of his timeline. “And back for the belt, that’s what we want. Nothing else. I’m not gonna let Dricus fight a ranked fighter. Ranked fighters are for other guys, not for us. We want the belt back.”
“Instead of spending time to prepare for another fight camp, to prepare for [Reinier de Ridder], I would rather spend that time to fix the problem that we’ve got and then go into a camp. So I won’t just take a fight because fights are available. I wanna fix this problem because we’re gonna face Khamzat, and I wanna destroy him this time.”
