With Volkanovski vs Holloway only hours away, the featherweight champion’s head coach, Eugene Bareman, has been forthright in his praise for the opponent facing Alexander “The Great.” Bareman appeared on The MMA Hour ahead of two of his team appearing on the fight card for UFC 276, namely Alexander Volkanovski and Israel Adesanya, and offered his appreciation for Max Holloway’s prodigious fighting ability.
Volkanovski soundly defeated Max Holloway in their first fight, but the second was a more hotly contested affair. “I’ll just say that I think both improved since their fights.
Volkanovksi’s Head Coach Praises Holloway Ahead of Trilogy Fight
I think they’ve both improved quite a bit. Look, Max showed me, in that second fight, something that I didn’t think he was capable of. He was able to quickly pick up things which takes your average fighter — and he’s not your average fighter, I guess that’s what he showed me — a lot longer to learn.
Max was able to do that, and I’ve said this before, we went for a more conservative game plan given the amount of time we had, where we just changed a few subtle things, and left it at that. That’s what we went for and we thought that Max would try and change a lot and he would not be successful doing that. That would be his undoing, trying to change too much in a short amount of time, and we were lucky that we were right, although we were only just right.”
Bareman, acknowledging how close his featherweight champ came to losing the belt in 2020, credited Max Holloway’s fight IQ for the razor-close nature of the sequel.
“His ability to learn something and then apply it really quickly, within a relatively short amount of time since that [first] fight.
Now we know that there’s a number of things that Max is now capable of changing now, given that the fight’s been quite a while. We know that Max could have changed a couple of things. You’ve got to remember, some fighters take years to do some things, some of the adjustments that Max was able to do in a relatively short amount of time, a few months.” His prediction for tonight, however, is very different.
“We’ve got a strategy, we’ve got some tactics there, and we have to establish those early. We at least need to see that strategy early so that we can start to make an assessment on what’s the direction we need to take that strategy, because it can go several places.”
His prediction? “A five round master class. A shut out. Just like the first fight was for Volkanovski.” Do you agree with Eugene Bareman? Let us know in the comments.
