Paddy Pimblett continues to poke the bear.
It feels that him and Ilja Topuria are going to be fighting next. Pimblett has made it no secret that he wants to beat the piss out of the UFC Lightweight Champion. And Topuria isn’t afraid to step into the octagon against the rising lightweight.
In fact, Topuria called out Pimblett after he beat Charles Oliveira at UFC 317! The 30-year-old wasn’t afraid to get into Topuria’s face. For those who don’t know, these two actually got into a scuffle back in 2022. It was at a hotel in London where Pimblett threw a hand sanitizer bottle at him and the two men went into it. That wasn’t the only intense confrontation between Topuria and Pimblett, but it was how their high profile feud began.
A bout between these two has yet to be made official, but that isn’t going to stop the trash talking from Pimblett. The lightweight is quite frustrated that Topuria hasn’t signed a contract for a fight and thinks the current champ is stalling.
"At the minute, I'm struggling to get a fight," Topuria told Marca. "People talk behind the scenes saying, 'I want to fight him. I want to fight him.' But when they get offered the fight, they don't take it. I'm just sitting in limbo, waiting for a fight. I thought I was going to fight Justin Gaethje in Abu Dhabi in October, but he's sitting out. Dan Hooker is fighting Arman Tsarukyan. Charles just fought Gamrot. There's no one really for me to fight apart from Ilia Topuria.
Hopefully that fight gets sorted. I think it would've been sorted by now if he would've signed the contract, but he's stalling. He's another one that talks a big game on the camera, but when it comes to signing the contract, he won't write his name on it."
Paddy has been wanting to fight Topuria since their beef started online in 2021. The lightweight feels that he should’ve been the first man to fight Topuria when he made the move to 155 pounds.
"I should've been his first fight at lightweight, but it never happened," Pimblett said. "He got gifted a title shot. There's probably other people that are more deserving than me, but gift me the title shot, and we'll do one of the biggest fights the UFC has ever seen. We don't like each other. We genuinely don't like each other. We both want to hit each other, and he's got something that I want."
Will these two lock horns soon? Hopefully, we’ll get the answer to Topuria’s next challenger very soon.