Ilia Topuria is set to face Justin Gaethje in the main event of UFC Freedom 250, the big White House card on Sunday, June 14th. There’s a lot of unknowns coming into this event — will it rain? Will gnats overrun the cage? But one thing is for certain: Topuria is coming in with a very extensive gameplan to destroy Gaethje.
In a new interview with Vic Blends, Topuria laid out how his team puts together their entire training regiment for each fight.
“It’s completely different, the preparation for every
fighter,” Topuria said. “Like, for example, once we got the confirmation that we were fighting with with Justin, the first thing I used to do with my team we’d sit down in front of the screen and we go in like Justin’s team [as if] we have to advise Justin on how he has to fight against Ilia.”
“We start watching my fights from the perspective of, ‘We are Justin’s team,'” he continued. “And we do the strategy of Justin. And based on Justin’s strategy, we make our strategy. We take away all his chances.”
“It’s like, first of all, we have to know how Justin and his team are gonna think,” Topuria explained. “How they are gonna prepare themselves against me. Once we get to that realization, we build our strategy. We build our game plan. And based on the game plan that we have, we build a whole training camp. The whole schedule.”
“Everything is based on the game plan .. We do the whole strategy and based on the strategy, we make the training camp.”
Gaethje spoke recently about his gameplan, which involved drilling out a lot of bad habits that Topuria could take advantage of. Will he be the same “Highlight” on fight night that Topuria and his team dissected months ago? He’ll certainly want to be closer to the tight Gaethje that fought Rafael Fiziev rather than the sloppy Gaethje that brawled with Paddy Pimblett.
