According to Robert Whittaker, a third fight with fellow former UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya is never going to happen as the two have recently shared the training room together.

Adesanya holds two wins over Whittaker, and since then, Whittaker was always hoping for a third crack with his former foe. But after photos and videos have surfaced with the pair getting some rounds in at the gym, and putting their differences aside, Whittaker now doesn’t eye that trilogy fight.

“Yeah, I think we can close that door,” Whittaker told Fox Sports Australia. “I don’t think the chances were high just because of where we’re both situated in our careers and just the division as a whole, but yeah, that door’s shut. I don’t fight people I eat with.”

Whittaker is working his way back to a fight after getting his teeth shattered during a first-round submission loss to Khamzat Chimaev at October’s UFC 308 event.

“The Reaper” realized there were some personnel issues that left Whittaker not being able to train to the best of his ability, so after a bit of thought, Whittaker realized that training with the likes of Adesanya, and under the tutelage of City Kickboxing head coach Eugene Bareman, he knew it was a move that could truly help him.

“Yeah, it’s a funny world, honestly,” Whittaker explained. “If you would’ve asked me a few years ago if I had ever seen this coming, the answer would’ve been, ‘Not in 100 years.’

“I guess where we were with the team back home, one of my training partners got injured, a couple of the other boys retired, had a couple of other commitments they wanted to focus on. So I sat down with the team, ‘We need to get some bodies, how do we get them?’ We started looking global... we started looking around everywhere, and then like a lightning bolt, where you realize that City Kickboxing is only a two and a half hour flight away, and they’ve got the bodies, it’s New Zealand, it’s the place of my birth. Everything just started lining up.

“Alex reached out to Eugene, had a conversation with me, Alex, and a couple of my training partners, come over here just to test the waters and see if we all get along. And yeah, we’re getting along.”