Sydney, Australia – UFC welterweight Blood Diamond looks to bounce back from two consecutive losses when he takes on Charlie Radtke at UFC 293 on Saturday night.
Diamond (3-2) won’t be alone on the card as six of his teammates, including middleweight king Israel Adesanya, are also on the card. City Kickboxing is well represented at UFC 293.
“It’s great. We feed off each other’s energy. Some days you just don’t feel great and you just feel a bit down, but you’ve got five more other people supporting you and just encouraging you,” Diamond told reporters on Wednesday.
“That exciting atmosphere got amplified like six times.”
The glaring hole in Diamond’s game in his last two fights has been the lack of grappling. Diamond is a natural striker, but the ground game is something he’s been putting time into specially coming into UFC 293.
“I want to showcase my striking just to show them I can stand with a lot of these guys, but also I’ve been working on my grappling and my wrestling. That’s another thing I would like to showcase,” he said.
In fact Diamond got some help from a local champion, and teammate, UFC featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski. Not necessarily in this camp but Diamond helped Volkanovski out in previous camps and learned a lot about grappling from the featherweight.
“I learn from my mistakes. For instance me going to help Volk’s camp. To be honest I feel like he was the one helping me because I went there and I was just doing what I do,” he said.
“I was picking his brain. After watching what he did against (Islam) Makhachev I was just like yeah definitely that could help me a lot. It was good.”
Watch the entire media day scrum with Blood Diamond above. He takes on Charlie Radtke at UFC 293 on Saturday night.
