Israel Adesanya has criticised Sean Strickland for his antics in sparring claiming that the UFC star has a "screw loose".
Strickland has been hugely controversial during his UFC career having admitted to going through "a weird neo-Nazi phase" in addition to making a whole host of borderline comments in wacky interviews. He has also come under scrutiny for his attitude to sparring which has seen him inflict damage on several of his partners including when recently stopping in California to spar a local kickboxer.
Strickland denied anything untoward about the video claiming that he had warned his teammate of the plan to fight at 100 per cent in the session. However Adesanya has claimed he has seen Strickland inflict more damage on YouTube than in his UFC outings. "Sean Strickland. He's a bad m***erf***er," Adesanya said when addressing the sparring footage on his YouTube channel. "Like, literally bad. Rotten apple. But I like the guy, he's funny and he likes to talk s*** as well.
"And his stand-up, I've seen him do more damage on YouTube in sparring than in his fights. Put it that way. I've seen his sparring footages and I would never spar with an idiot like that. I've hurt people in sparring before and I'm just like, 'S***, my bad'. Or I'll pull back with the body shot or whatever but I've seen what he does... He's got many screws loose, many screws loose."
Adesanya was recently involved in an incident of his own in sparring when he nearly knocked out his coach, coming inches away from landing a kick to the head, However he was very apologetic despite his coach joking he had suffered a "near death experience".
The video went viral of Strickland with the footage viewed hundreds of thousands of times, which added to a collection of videos of Strickland taking sparring with any teammates very seriously. However on this occasion, Strickland defended his actions having claimed his rival's coach wanted the footage recorded despite having no plans to release it.
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"The story behind that was he was a really cool Japanese guy, a kickboxer," Strickland told Mirror Fighting . "I go to San Diego to sail, I've got this old f****** sail boat I'm surprised hasn't sunk yet, and I pretty much have an open invitation that I want to fight somebody. I didn't say spar, I didn't say 'lightly,' I said I wanted to fight somebody.
"I get the call from somebody who says 'my boy is in town, he has a kickboxing match, go spar him.' "So I say 'alright, f*** it,' but before we start I let him know 'I'm not your friend, I'm not here to be your f****** buddy, I'm here to hurt you - f*** you up'." "So I just beat the f*** out of him, but it wasn't sneaky, I didn't lie to him, I didn't hide my video camera."
