Dricus du Plessis may not be able to close gap to Khamzat Chimaev, says Dominick Cruz

MMA analyst Dominick Cruz isn’t convinced that Dricus du Plessis will be able to close the gap to Khamzat Chimaev.

In their UFC 319 title fight, Khamzat Chimaev dominated Dricus du Plessis to become UFC middleweight champion. He did so in impressive fashion, and as we look ahead to the future, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which he loses the belt.

Of course, Dricus du Plessis will do everything in his power to achieve that goal. In order to do so, he needs to go back to the drawing board and really figure out how he’s going to tackle the elephant in the room – the wrestling prowess of ‘Borz’.

In a recent podcast appearance, Dominick Cruz gave his honest thoughts on the skill gap between Chimaev and Dricus du Plessis.

Dominick Cruz’s view on Dricus du Plessis

“He says six months, I’ll fill some gaps, but when I look at that, that’s not six months,” Cruz said on the “Anik & Florian Podcast.” “He didn’t separate one time – like, nothing. His legs weren’t getting involved from his back. He’s just never been put on his back that long, I don’t think, and you have to have an offense from the bottom in order to get up.

“If your job when you get taken down is just to get up and escape, that’s kind of defensive in a way. So, if you’re on the bottom and you’re getting held down, you have to have some sort of offensive attack from the bottom. Like, you need to go for a single-leg (takedown).

“You need to be able to be off balance to get to a double leg. You need to be able to get off balance to create space and get to a front headlock, and then you have to create some sort of offense from the bottom. Some sort of attack, so that the person on top of you stops blanketing you, and he couldn’t really create that. 

“When you look at the differential in that particular fight, it just looked like two completely different level fighters, because the separation wasn’t there. Now, I could say if DDP got away one time, I would have a totally different thing to say, but he didn’t, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t get away once. He couldn’t separate once.”

“I think DDP beats almost everybody else in the division,” Cruz said. “Just that particular matchup is just really exposing stuff, and that’s the thing about being champion.”

Quotes via MMA Junkie