So far in his seven fights in the UFC, no one has had an answer for Dricus du Plessis.

The South African, the organisation’s middleweight champion since January, has five finishes over the course of that time and enters his title defence against Israel Adesanya at this weekend’s UFC 305 event in Perth, Australia facing up to arguably his biggest challenge to date.

And speaking exclusively to The Mac Life ahead of his fight Down Under, Adesanya says that he can crack the South African’s code that has so far flummoxed his other opponents.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a hard puzzle, in a sense, because he’s great at what he does but styles make fights,” Adesanya said on Wednesday.  “He’s great at what he does and he gets away with a lot of things because he makes people play his game. You go wrestling with a pig, you’re gonna get messy too and the pig is gonna win because it’s going to drag you down and beat you with experience.

“But I can get muddy too when it’s time to get muddy. I can play in the water as well. But again, I know how to fight clean and I know how to fight dirty, if that makes sense. I’ll play both sides when I need to. Wait until [UFC 305], I’ll show you guys. I’ll play both sides. It could be muddy first, it could be clean first — we’ll find out.”

And as for Adesanya’s next step? He says he wants to start adding further big names to his list of defeated opponents.

“Legacy fights. Fights that I actually want to fight. Strickland; that’s a revenge tour. Who knows what happens with Rob [Whittaker] and Khamzat.”

“For [Whittaker], I know in the back of his mind he’s burning to fight me because he believes he can beat me. And he can, but I have to stop him from doing that — and I’ve done that twice. That’s always there for him but it doesn’t really excite me.”