Israel Adesanya Says His Popularity Increased In Spite Of Boring UFC 248 Fight
Israel Adesanya had perhaps the worst performance of his MMA career, at UFC 248. Despite this, he feels like people are more interested in him than ever before.
Adesanya managed to secure the first defense of his UFC Middleweight title on Saturday night, against Yoel Romero. The only problem was that the fight was rather uneventful, with the most significant strikes coming from leg kicks. Nevertheless, Adesanya managed to secure the unanimous decision.
Following the fight, there were questions as to who was to blame for this uneventful fight. However, speaking with Ariel Helwani, Adesanya explained that he does not care who the fans blame. In fact, he says that he actually gained new fans from this fight, rather than losing any.
“Stocks go up and down. That’s the nature of the stocks, they fluctuate. So I mean if the stock goes down from this fight, I don’t think so. I think it goes up, I just don’t think it goes up as high as I anticipated.”
It certainly does not seem like Adesanya lost fans from his performance. However it seems hard to believe that he would have been able to gain more from a fight that was not normal for his style. Although it certainly helps that Dana White is pushing the blame for the boring performance almost entirely on Romero.
Ultimately it seems likely that this fight was just an usual blip on the radar for Israel Adesanya. His next opponent is expected to be Paulo Costa, which is a fight that seems primed to get people to rally behind the Stylebender again, and forget about this unusual fight.
