Sean O’Malley believes Dominick Cruz needs to learn from him about how to approach taking fights.
After O’Malley’s UFC 264 TKO win over Kris Moutinho, he called out several fighters, including Cruz. The hope was the fight would come to fruition, but according to “Suga,” the former bantamweight champ turned him down and opted to fight Pedro Munhoz instead due to the fact that he is higher ranked.
However, for O’Malley, he says Cruz needs to learn something from him because he is now on the pay-per-view at UFC 269 while Cruz is on the prelims.
“I want to address the Dominick Cruz stuff first and I don’t want to be mean because he’s clearly slowing down,” O’Malley said on his YouTube channel (via Sportskeeda). “Not physically maybe, but mentally… he said he doesn’t want that fight because he wants to fight someone higher up, so therefore he turned the fight down. I asked that fight, we asked for that fight for a while. We asked Sean Shelby, he turned it down… I didn’t listen to the interview but it’s just a weird thing to say. He said something to where I’m like, dude, you need to learn from daddy because I’m above you on the card.”
At UFC 269, O’Malley will face Raulian Paiva, who is in the rankings. Paiva is a former flyweight who has moved up to bantamweight and coming off a win over Kyler Phillips, who is O’Malley’s teammate.
O’Malley is currently on a two-fight winning streak as prior to beating Moutinho, he knocked out Thomas Almeida. In the fight before, the fan-favorite suffered a first-round TKO loss to Marlon Vera in a fight he hurt his ankle in.
What do you make of Sean O’Malley’s advice to Dominick Cruz after the UFC 269 bout order was revealed?
