ABU DHABI – Cory Sandhagen admits he’ll spiritually be in the corner of the bantamweight champion at UFC 306.
Should he defeat Umar Nurmagomedov after Saturday’s UFC on ABC 7 in Abu Dhabi, Sandhagen (17-4 MMA, 10-3 UFC) thinks he’ll align himself nicely for a crack at title gold.
Sandhagen isn’t particularly interested in a backup role, but plans to attend and root hard for Sean O’Malley to defeat Merab Dvalishvili at Noche UFC, the Sept. 14 pay-per-view at Sphere in Las Vegas. His motivation for partiality is self-benefit, of course.
“Yeah, I’m definitely rooting for O’Malley,” Sandhagen told MMA Junkie on Tuesday. “That’s definitely the bigger fight. That’s a fight that people have been asking for forever. I think that me and him go into a cage and it’s just going to be fireworks. It’s going to be so technical and so skilled, super athletic. That’s what the fans want to see really, really bad. I’m going to get this win. O’Malley, get yourself a win, and then we’ll give the fans what they’ve been asking for, for years. I really think there’s no more exciting fight or no fight I feel like is being asked for more in the UFC than me and O’Malley. That’s what I hope happens.”
O’Malley is currently a slight underdog across all major online sports books, which surprises Sandhagen. Sandhagen relates to O’Malley in that they both are often criticized for a facet of their game they haven’t really shown much.
“I think O’Malley is in a little bit of the same position as me,” Sandhagen said. “We haven’t seen O’Malley fight a ton of wrestlers. There are a lot of unknowns there. You haven’t seen me fight a ton of wrestlers, so you don’t really know how good my defensive wrestling is. I think he is in a little bit of the same boat. Usually, when that’s the case, people choose wrestling. That’s been chosen time and time again, that wrestling is usually the king of combat sports. I think that they’re likely counting him out for that, but we haven’t really seen him do much wrestling. So, who knows? He could be as good as Jordan Burroughs or Kyle Dake or Vito Araujo, but I guess you don’t really know.”
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