Conor McGregor mötte i helgen Chad Mendes under UFC 189 i Las Vegas. Inför den stora matchen där McGregor från början skulle ha mött Jose Aldo, pratades det mycket om att irländaren inte hade några större kunskaper inom brottning och därför inte skulle kunna försvara sig på mot den mycket mer erfarne Mendes.
Enligt hans manager John Kavanagh tränade dock McGregor aldrig någon brottning inför matchen på grund av en knäskada.
Det här berättade Kavanagh, via ”The MMA Hour”:
Well, it’s not come up yet, but I am going to tell you. We didn’t do one live round of MMA training or wrestling for this training camp because Conor had an injury. We weren’t able to train at full pace. I’ve gotta be honest, when we were walking out to this fight it was in the back of my mind that we haven’t done a single round of live wrestling. I had my eyebrows raised and thought, ’let’s see what happens.’ And he, Conor, was laughing. The injury is healed now, but it wasn’t until about two weeks before the fight that we felt it was 100 percent. But, we still didn’t want to do full pace to exasperate it. Really, the first round of full wrestling was done in that fight. His timing a little bit on the sprawl and dealing with the shot was not quite there. It started getting better as the fight went on. Do I think a rematch if it does happen down the line would be different? Yes, for both of them. I don’t want to go into the injury too much, it’s fine now. That was the first full test on the knee and he flew through it. He was able to deal with some positions. There were some scrambles, there was a lot of wrestling and it held up and there’s nothing wrong. So we’re 100 percent confident that it’s perfect now.
McGregor segrade via knockout i andra ronden.
