Umar Nurmagomedov bounced back from his first career loss at UFC 321 to sweep Mario Bautista 30-27 on all three judges scorecards. But even that wasn’t good enough to leave the bantamweight contender completely
happy with his performance.
In the second round, Nurmagomedov shot in on Bautista, only to eat a massive knee that put him down to the canvas. While Umar was able to recover from the strike and even win the round, it was an opening that was identified in training camp and not closed.
“I have this big mistake, I always go down,” he said of his habit of leaving his chin open during a shoot. “I do it a lot of times. Even in the gym, Coach Khabib all the time he talks to me, ‘Don’t do this, you have to fix this.’ And today I paid for it. We’re not perfect, right? But we will try to become.”
To Umar, perfect is a standard held by his cousin and coach Khabib Nurmagomedov that he’s still striving for.
“In the gym, everything works for me,” he admitted. “I can control guys, I can go for submissions. But in the cage, [Khabib] is psychologically much stronger than me. And in the cage I feel like something is missing. I’ll keep striving.”
Nurmagomedov is still hoping he can rematch Merab Dvalishvili for the bantamweight belt should “The Machine” win at UFC 323 in December. But if it means having to wait until after Ramadan in February / March, he’d rather turn around quickly than wait.
“If it’s not going to happen before Ramadan, they give me another fight, maybe with [Deiveson] Figueiredo or Aiemann Zahabi,” Nurmagomedov said. “With anybody else, I’ll be happy to fight, because today I become a little better in the cage because it’s an experience.”
“We need to spend a lot of time in the cage to feel like it’s home. Feel confidence, feel arena, feel fans, I want to fight. I don’t have anything else, I just have sleep, eat, train, repeat.”
