The video of UFC veteran Sean Strickland and ADCC World Champion Orlando Sanchez getting into a fight with one another in training went viral recently, and for good reason. Fans were pretty divided after seeing the lead-up to the fight where Sanchez and Strickland were training grappling at a relatively slow and measured pace, right up until the key moment. Strickland put in a relatively lazy underhook and Sanchez reached over and powered through to apply a lot of torque to his shoulder, the same move famously used by Jon Jones against Glover Teixeira.
This resulted in Strickland becoming furious with the grappler and lashing out with a backfist and front-kick as he complained about the ‘dirty’ technique. Some fans criticized Sanchez heavily for applying a submission with the potential to cause serious damage at a very high pace and with seemingly no regard for his partner’s safety. Others however, were more critical of Strickland’s response than the original offending technique.
Since then, Sanchez has given his side of things and put a lot of the blame for the altercation on Strickland instead. Now, the other side of the argument has made a statement on it, although curiously Strickland doesn’t address the situation itself. Instead, he directed his comments more towards the fans who criticized his reaction to the ‘dirty’ technique:
“I feel like this needs to be said about the video response.. What happened to the modern man?!?!?! You cowards sit behind your phone running your mouths to me and to each other.. Bunch of f*cking women using their thumbs to fight BUT to those men out there still down to scrap when you need to scrap I salute.. Keep holding it down, you’re a dying breed….”
“Come say that to my face. I’m a cage fighter. I hurt people for a living. I’d slap your F$%ing face.”
The above statement was made in a post to his official Instagram account, that has since been deleted, as per BJJEE. He did eventually address the event itself in comments on some of his others posts however:
“There is a difference between grinding hard mentally pushing yourself as to opposed to intentionally doing something that isn’t allowed in training to hurt someone who isn’t expecting it to happen. The reason why people were on my side is because they know that move isn’t done in the gym.”
