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Lorenzo Fertitta: Därför valde vi Chad Mendes istället för Frankie Edgar

För bara ett par dagar sedan blev det klart att Chad Mendes skulle bli den som fick ersätta fjäderviktsmästaren Jose Aldo under UFC 189. Många har frågat sig varför man valde Mendes före Frankie Edgar, som tidgare gjorde det tydligt att han ville ha titelmatch mot vinnaren av Aldo vs. McGregor.

Det här berättade Lorenzo Fertitta, via ”MMAMania”:

What happened was we basically drove down to the McMansion, woke up Conor and said, hey, this is the deal, this is what we heard, and what do you want to do? Conor didn’t have any idea what was going on, but he said you know, I want to fight. One hundred percent. His hair was sticking up, he’d just woken up, he was in his boxers, and he walked into the kitchen and said, ‘I’m fighting — I don’t care who it is, I’m showing up on the 11th.’ So we said, okay, now we know what we can do.

En avgörande faktor som gjorde att man valde Mendes var att han vid tillfället stod rankad som nummer ett vid tillfället:

At the end of the day we looked also at…look, Mendes is formally ranked No. 1 ahead of McGregor. It would have been a little weird if we picked Frankie and then Chad would say, but I’m number one. Not that we always go distinctly by one, two or three, but both guys were available, and he was number one and Frankie was number two. I think looking at Mendes’ past performances [helped]. That fight last fall against Aldo [at UFC 179] was one of the great fights in UFC history. In his last fight against Lamas he blew right through the guy. And it was like, you know what, he’s got the momentum we feel like, and we feel like he deserves it. And quite honestly, it was funny because I was literally sitting in my office, and I was on Twitter or something and I think [MMA Fighting’s] Luke Thomas tweeted something like, ‘one thing I know is not going to happen today is they’re not going to announce that Mendes is the replacement.’ And I was like, it’s Mendes.

När rankningarna uppdaterades i början av veckan hade Mendes dock sjunkit till nummer två och Edgar var rankad som nummer ett.

Mendes möter nu McGregor under UFC 189 den 11 juli i Las Vegas.

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