Alexander Volkov was nearly flawless in the UFC Fight Night 221 co-main event.
The 6-foot-7 Russian denied multiple takedown attempts from Alexander Romanov before putting his opponent away with ground-and-pound just 2:16 into Round 1 of their heavyweight clash at The Theater at Virgin Hotels in Las Vegas on Saturday night. In addition to failing on all of his takedown tries, Romanov didn’t land a strike in the abbreviated bout. Even then, Volkov thought his win could have arrived earlier than it did.
“You always feel good after the victory, so I feel great that I won. Really what I’d like to say is everything that we’ve worked on in the camp, everything we’ve put so much time into, I really feel that it’s great that it happened the way that it happened,” Volkov said through a translator at the post-fight press conference. “Exactly what we expected him to do, he did in the fight. This is what we worked on.
“So I feel like it wasn’t as fast as we thought it was going to be, but everything we expected did happen, which is why the fight happened the way that it did.”
While Volkov is firmly established as a Top 10 heavyweight, Romanov’s hype has faded after following 16 consecutive wins with back-to-back defeats in the Octagon. Volkov can envision a scenario where he and Romanov work together as training partners.
“I wish him good luck, I think he’s a great guy. I think we could actually even work together in the future,”Volkov said. “There’s lots of things that I could take from him when it comes to wrestling, I’m sure I could work with him on his striking. Really everybody who’s in the Top 15 is all worthy opponents. We could all learn something from each other and we could all face each other in the future.
“My biggest thing is that I hope that this second loss is not going to be too much of a roadblock for him, that he’s not going to stop believing in himself and he’s going to keep moving forward.”
Volkov has fought the vast majority of the UFC’s ranked heavyweights, and he hopes to avoid facing an opponent like Tai Tuivasa or Derrick Lewis that is on a losing streak.
“Really, I’d like to possibly revenge somebody that I’ve lost to,” Volkov said. “Maybe, for instance, my rematch with [Ciryl] Gane would be interesting.”
Though Volkov has a lot of mileage with 46 professional bouts to his credit, he is relatively young for a heavyweight at 34 years old. With the way things are going, “Drago” can see himself continuing to fight for quite some time.
“I’ve done this for a while, but at the age I started in, I was still learning. So I’m just now coming into form,” he said. “I think I am still learning myself. We can possibly say I have a threshold of maybe 40 [years old], but for now I feel great and I want to move forward.
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