There continues to remain no love lost between current middleweight champion Israel Adesanya and Paulo Costa judging by their most recent comments about each other.
“I guess he wasn’t ready to fight,” Adesanya told mmafighting.com when asked about Costa pulling out of their intended fight due to requiring bicep surgery. “If he wanted to fight, he would have made sure to do the right things to be in shape already to fight. I don’t pull out. My pullout game is weak.
“Unfortunately for him, he might miss his shot forever if he doesn’t climb his way back up the ranks. That’s why I said I want to fight homeboy Paulo Costa because I want to get him and I want to beat him before USADA gets him. I like the challenge of that.”
Adesanya also admitted that it would have been a fight he would have relished due to the rivalry between them.
“I was looking forward to my next fight, because that would have sold itself. Because he would try to trash talk me in his broken English, and I would embarrass him on the mic, and then eventually I’d embarrass him on the mat. So that was already set in stone that it was going to be glorious.”
Those comments appear to have gotten under Costa’s skin as he’s since ranted about the champion on Twitter.
“Adesanya is afraid, into himself he knows. He try looks good but everybody so skinny and fragile as him fell afraid to fight against powerful guys. Pussy African!”
Costa then followed that up by saying, “I wanna kill only 1 African. That skinny bigmouth.”
However, the Brazilian has since thought better of his remarks and hit the delete button.
