Claudio Silva says Nordine Taleb did not take his submission loss too well at UFC Liverpool and tried to get back at the Brazilian at the hotel.
Being away from the Octagon for almost four years was not the only ordeal Claudio ‘Hannibal’ Silva had to deal with at UFC Fight Night 130, in Liverpool, England. According to the welterweight fighter, his opponent, Nordine Taleb, did not take too kindly to the first-round submission loss suffered on the second main card bout of the evening.
As Silva explained to Bloody Elbow, Taleb did not want to talk with him after the match and even tried to start a brawl at the hotel, afterwards. According to Hannibal, Nordine called him names and said he would beat him again if they were ever to rematch.
“Nordine Taleb is a very disrespectful individual,” Silva said. “He’s really arrogant. After the fight, I tried talking to him and he told me not to talk to him. Afterwards, I was sitting at the hotel and he walked by me and I greeted him. He turned around and said ‘F—k you, you son of a bitch. You’re a piece of sh-t. I’ll beat you 10 times out of 10. Let’s go right now’. I was like ‘What’s your problem? Are you crazy?’ and he replied by saying ‘If anybody talks to me like that, I’ll kill them. You’re nobody, you’re sh-t.’
“I think the UFC should do something about it. Can you imagine if my mom or my son were there to hear those things? That guy is the scum of the sport. That’s what I think. He had 15 minutes to beat me and couldn’t do it. Now he wants to fight on the streets? He has to be banned from the sport.”
As for the fight itself, the 35-year old believes the long Octagon hiatus did not play too much of a factor during the match. Claudio believes he was able to dominate the fight despite the layoff and did not feel too much pressure coming back.
“Defeating Taleb was huge,” he said. “He was talking a lot of trash, he was disrespecting me, saying a lot of things about me. I don’t think he was winning the stand-up fight. He just swooped my leg at one point. I was hurting him with body kicks. I kind of felt the pressure in the first minutes, but after I landed my hands on him and took him down, it was what everybody saw. I dominated the entire fight. I used some ground and pound and I made him give up his back and he tapped out. He quit. This win means a lot to me. He was on a three-fight winning streak.”
On Twitter, Nordine Taleb was dissatisfied with the results, writing that the sole reason he lost the fight was because referee Neil Hall said he was grabbing Silva’s glove moments before the fight-ending grappling exchange.
Claudio Silva (12-1) is now on a three-fight winning streak in the UFC, with wins over Brad Scott, Leon Edwards, and Taleb. The Brazilian’s sole loss came in his MMA debut, in November 2007.
