“Be nice,” said Sean Strickland back in 2022 when he saw Khamzat Chimaev going a bit too hard with his sparring partners. It’s been around three years since the clip of the former champion telling off the title contender went viral on the internet, as Strickland recalled training with ‘Borz’ during a recent interview. It appears that he still has no love for Chimaev, claiming that he used to bully fighters when they were training in the same gym.

“You’re picking the 1-1 fighter because you think he’s the same height as your opponent. No dude, you’re picking him because you’re a b—h. Mentally, he’s just a weak man,” said Sean Strickland. Well, it may not be wrong to say that ‘Tarzan’ isn’t all that gentle while sparring with himself. After all, he beat up a social media influencer, Sneako, and left him banged up thereafter.

But Khamzat Chimaev, who has a big fight coming up, perhaps the biggest against Dricus du Plessis, did not back down from responding to the former champion. Claiming that the former champion never spoke the things he’s been saying about him to his face, he has invited him to come spar with him one more time to put an end to their back-and-forth. “If it’s something personal for you, just come. I’m here. Whenever he wants,” he said.

Meanwhile, one of Sean Strickland’s training partners, Roman Dolidze, made some revelations about his sparring sessions with the former champion. It appears that ‘Tarzan’s take on Khamzat Chimaev was a bit hypocritical. The Georgian fighter claims ‘Tarzan’ and he does not hold back on each other during sparring, which often takes the form of a real dogfight, but only if there’s no UFC fight on the horizon.

“With Sean Strickland, we always fight each other. Like, we can’t spar. We are both same. That’s why if he have fight, he tries to avoid me because he knows that we will fight anyway,” Roman Dolidze stated on the ‘Overdogs Podcast’. “We can’t spar just light or when I know that he have fight and I need to be careful, I still don’t care. I will go 100 percent with him. That’s why we try to avoid each other when we have fights.”

Roman Dolidze cleared the air about any kind of beef between him and Sean Strickland because there was none. It was just the nature of the two fighters, who came from different cultures and different places, duking it out in the gym. Besides, Dolidze claims that Strickland doesn’t give himself enough credit for being a kind person, although some of his fellow UFC fighters, including Khamzat Chimaev, may not agree with it.

Amid the heated back-and-forth between Sean Strickland and Khamzat Chimaev, the former has also shared his prediction for the UFC 319 headliner. But the focus was on ‘Borz’ and the way in which he can lose to Dricus du Plessis. Here’s what he had to say.

Sean Strickland gives Dricus du Plessis a blueprint to beat Khamzat Chimaev

Sean Strickland has yet to fight Khamzat Chimaev in the UFC, but did train together back in the day, as we’ve mentioned already. And having fought Dricus du Plessis, he also has an idea as to what he can do as well. And although Strickland praised Chimaev’s wrestling skills, he doesn’t think it will be enough to keep the South African down because he has been able to tackle these wrestling moves easily during his time training with Russian fighters.

“Dricus has better standup than Chimaev, but Chimaev has pretty crazy grappling… I know how to get up from these guys, and I can withstand a storm. I don’t know if [du Plessis] has encountered that level of wrestling to where it might get him a little off guard,” Sean Strickland told ‘Red Corner MMA’. “He just really has to be ready for an extreme amount of pressure on the ground. If he can withstand that, he’s gonna beat him [Chimaev].”

Khamzat Chimaev may not care about the title, but he surely cares about winning, so it might be better for him to get over the finish line at UFC 319 first before investing his mind into Sean Strickland. Nevertheless, let us know your thoughts on this beef between the two middleweight stars and Roman Dolidze’s claims about Strickland as a person. Drop your comments below.