Sean Strickland knows that Anthony Hernandez will be hard to fight and train for.
Former middleweight champion Strickland (29-7 MMA, 16-7 UFC) takes on Hernandez (15-2 MMA, 9-2 UFC) in the UFC Fight Night 267 main event (Paramount+) Feb. 21 at Toyota Center in Houston.
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Hernandez is known for his suffocating grappling pressure, which he used to full effect in his submission win over Strickland’s teammate Roman Dolidze at UFC on ESPN 72.
“‘Fluffy’ is a hard f*cking fight,” Strickland told ESPN MMA. “Endless gas tank, he’s beat some of my buddies. I think Edmen (Shahbazyan) kind of sh*t the bed in that fight. … Yeah, it’s going to be a great fight. I can’t wait. It’s going to be a miserable fight.
“There’s going to be a level of misery there that’s hard to train for. It’s hard to train for that kind of misery. You know it’s going to be fourth round, fifth round. Like, f*ck. Five more minutes of this f*cking parasite. That’s how he’s made his career laying on guys, but it’s hard.”
Strickland is no stranger to five-round fights, with his past four fights going the full 25 minutes.
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“I don’t know anything else than five rounds,” Strickland said. “You just train for that. ‘Fluffy’ is a hard guy to train for because there’s nobody who really fights like him, that has that pace. So a lot of my training, my wrestling rounds are outside of sparring. Just go with a guy until he becomes a dead body, then go with another guy.”
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Why Sean Strickland dubs Anthony Hernandez a ‘miserable’ fight
