Junior dos Santos Talks Cain Velasquez, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira

UFC heavyweight number one contender Junior dos Santos is counting down the days until he finally gets his title shot. After being scheduled to fight champion Cain Velasquez before and having it  fall apart due to the champ's shoulder injury, you can bet that JDS just wants everything to go smoothy until November 19th. That's when he's scheduled (again) to get his shot, in San Jose, CA at UFC 138. Dos Santos spoke to Tatame earlier this week about Cain and about his mentor Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, who was defeated by Velasquez over a year ago.

After talking about his win over Shane Carwin at UFC 131 for a bit, he moved on to discussing how he would approach a fight with Velasquez in the cage:

Much aggressive, much aggressive. Velasquez is a guy who has great conditioning, so he’s a guy I want to go for the knockout or the submission. I can’t give him time or space to work on what he likes, the takedowns and doing the ground and pound game.

And he talked about how his wrestling has improved greatly:

I train Wrestling a lot, I like training takedown defenses, and I consider myself good while defending takedown attempts. So, that’s why I feel pretty much comfortable when the guys try to take me down, I feel comfortable, cool with it.

Does the fact that Velasquez defeated his coach Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira give him any extra motivation for his matchup with Cain?

No. It’s a big challenge for me, but not because he has defeated Rodrigo, because Rodrigo is amazing, he’s an awesome guy, and I’m pretty sure he’ll turn it up and I guess he could even go there and do his rematch against Velasquez. We say there’s no such thing, but it makes it a little spicier because I want to win to prove that we have a strong team here, but I think about it as my challenge and my focus, I want to win this fight and become the champion.

Cigano also speaks in much more detail about Nogueira's matchup with Brendan Schaub at UFC 134 in the piece, and it's worth checking out. You can read the rest of the interview here.