Alexander Volkanovski’s Coach Blasts UFC Commentary Team

Eugene Bareman listened back to recent UFC commentary involving his fighter, Alexander Volkanovski.

And he wasn’t all too happy.

Volkanovski scored a title defense over Brian Ortega at UFC 266 this past weekend. But during an interview with Submission Radio, Bareman discussed his fight with Max Holloway.

“We’re happy to have a Holloway fight at this point. And let me just be a little bit honest. I wasn’t happy to do the Holloway rematch. I don’t know if I’ve ever made that public, but I was the one person in our team that said, no, let’s not go to fight island and let’s not fight Max,” he said. “It was too quick a turnaround and there’s enough in our favor, us being the champ, for us to go there. So, I was dead set against it, and that’s the honest truth. I just felt that, I think there was six or seven months between the fights, and I felt it was enough time for Max to make some really good adjustments and get them under his belt to a level that he could actually use them in a fight against Alex. Seven months I thought was enough. And I didn’t think it was enough for us to figure out what those changes in strategy and skill were gonna be for him for Max. Because that’s a problem.

“Because you’re trying to guess something that you don’t have any hard evidence on. You’re doing a whole lot of guesswork. There’s no hard evidence there. So, I felt everything wasn’t in our favor for that second Max fight. So, I was dead set against it. And when we decided as a team to take that second Max fight and we come up with a strategy that we thought worked, we knew we’d be under the pump. We knew we’d be under the pump cause we were playing a guessing game as to what Max was doing. And there was a lot of stuff that we would have to work out on the fly for that fight.

“But in the end, we got the job done. And another thing that annoys me about that fight is, people need to go back and watch that fight. People need to go back and seriously watch that fight, slow it down, turn off the commentators and watch that fight. But the first two rounds were close, and then after that you cannot, not any sane person can give Max the next three. The next three were a shutout.”

“In the third, fourth and fifth round, if you’re just going off the stats, they weren’t close. And if you watch the fight and forget the stats, the last three rounds weren’t close in the second fight. You cannot give that fight to Max. The problem, the ultimate problem was, you had the fraternity against Volk.

“You had the commentators, you had two chum-chum commentators, Cormier and Holloway, who I think they used to be in a relationship or something back in the day. They’re like ex-boyfriend and ex-girlfriend or something. They love each other. And then you had Cormier building this rhetoric of how Max should have won, and then you had Dana jumping on it. Go back and watch that fight. Go back and seriously study that fight, and there’s no way.”