Dominick Cruz open to a rubber match with Urijah Faber but knows other challengers are lining up to face him

UFC bantamweight champion, Dominick Cruz has revealed that he’s more than happy to go head-to-head with long-time rival, Urijah Faber for a third time after recently defeating “The California Kid” via unanimous decision in Las Vegas, Nevada, although he knows the list of other challengers is growing by the day.
Speaking via Sherdog.com, Cruz said:

“I’m not going to turn down a rubber match. I fight whoever the UFC thinks is next. … D.J.’s been looking real good – Demetrious Johnson. Brian Bowles won again. I know that he wants to get a shot. It’s not really my job to choose title contenders and what not. I’ve never chose a fight and I never will, but I wouldn’t turn it down.”

On his win over Faber just over a week ago, Cruz said:

“I felt that I had the higher output and landed the bigger shots with the higher output. He landed big shots as well but not as many of them, and I feel that I was being a lot more busy than him and I accomplished more takedowns than he did. So in my opinion, I liked the scorecards.”

“It’s just, me and Faber were fighting at a pretty wicked pace. I think that’s just attributed to the way we were fighting in the first three rounds. It slowed us down just a little bit in the fourth and fifth, but I think we were still keeping a pretty good pace, especially me. I was trying to just make sure to outpace him more than anything.”

“The way that I choose to fight, there’s a couple ways to fight me. He chose the straight-on approach. You can either sit back and wait for me to connect and try to close your eyes and counter right when you see me throw or you can do what he did and try to come forward and do what you can. I think that style favors Faber pretty well in the sense that he’s quick. He felt like that would be a good approach for him and he fought well.”

“I feel like I was trying to come forward just as much as he was. I felt like I marched forward and was trying to get in his grill, looking for the finish, throwing heat with everything I could, and that kind of gave up my chin a little bit. I was never completely out of the fight, but of course sometimes you get hit and you see little flashes. Every now and then you see a flash and you just keep scrapping, and that’s what I did.”

Both men have now secured a win over each other and despite Cruz running away with the decision in the latest fight Faber did drop him to the canvas on multiple occasions, proving he has the power to stop the champion at the blink of an eye.

By Michael Pepper.