Following his fourth loss in a row to Joe Pyfer at UFC Seattle, it’s safe to say Israel Adesanya isn’t just skidding, his career has crashed hard into a concrete wall. But after the 2nd round TKO, Adesanya defiantly declared he wasn’t going anywhere.
Adesanya was looking good through the first round and a half of the fight, if a bit sloppy with his defenses. Pyfer landed numerous big blows on “The Last Stylebender,” who reacted calmly enough and stuck to a gameplan of peppering shots and nasty calf
kicks. But halfway through the second round, Adesanya went from picking his shots to brawling, and Pyfer landed the bigger shots. The Philly native then took Izzy down and went from mount to back control before flattening Adesanya and pounding him out (watch the highlights here).
Daniel Cormier asked Adesanya about the shift in strategy that led to his downfall.
“I said before coming into this fight, it’s been 13 months,” he replied. “I wanted to feel like I’d been in a fight, and he gave me just that. So like I said to him at the weigh-ins, they gave me a shot, now it’s my turn to give him a shot. And he earned it. And he did so great. So congrats to Joe Pyfer for this.”
With this being his fourth loss in a row, this one coming at the hands of a No. 14 ranked Pyfer, Cormier began to probe Adesanya about what was next. Retirement?
“Keep going again and again and again and again and again!” Adesanya yelled. “I’m not f–king leaving! You’ll never stop me. I might get beaten, but I’ll always remain undefeated.”
It’s unclear what Adesanya has left to offer in the cage. The mystique is gone. He’s getting hit with shots that Izzy Prime never would have been in range for. And Joe Pyfer easily ran him straight back into the cage and took him down with relative ease twice, the second time resulting in a finish. If it isn’t just age and mileage that’s caused the slip, we’d say something big needs to change in training.
City Kickboxing’s grapping rep is in tatters these days, but despite Izzy’s strong words against retirement we doubt he’s prepared to leave the comfort of home base and develop new wrinkles in his game at this point in his career. Leaving him where? Probably in the same place he was for UFC Seattle, which led him to this totally preventable loss.
The fight was entertaining, no doubt. But it’s hard to watch one of the most impressive cage artists of this era get taken out like that.
