Det börjar närma sig. UFC 229 äger rum den 6:e oktober och i huvudmatchen ser vi Conor McGregor återvända från sina upptåg utanför buren och ta sig an lättviktsmästaren, Khabib Nurmagomedov.
Ännu har inte presskonferensen ägt rum när denna artikel skrivs, men det har varit förvånansvärt lite ’trash talk’ innan matchen. McGregors tränare, John Kavangh, verkar dock försöka sätta galler i huvudet på Nurmagomedov och ifrågasätter hans psyke inne i buren. Om dagistaniern förlorar en rond mot irländaren, hur kommer han att reagera?
Genom The Mac Life diskuterar Kavanagh fenomenet när en obesegrad fighter är på väg att förlora. Kavanagh har sett det ett par gånger tidigare och ifrågasätter hur Nurmagomedov kommer tackla just det, att förlora en rond.
It is interesting fighting an unbeaten fighter. I’ve had a lot of my guys that went a long time unbeaten and then they have the loss. It’s always interesting to see, in that fight where they had their first loss, when things start to go wrong. It’s an unusual feeling for them and sometimes they struggle to deal with that. I don’t think Khabib has lost a single round in his UFC career. If you do lose a round are you going to be able to come back out with that same level of confidence in the next round? There’s a lot of interesting things to be played out in this fight.
Vidare diskuterar Kavanagh om Nurmagomedovs match mot hans senaste motståndare, Al Iaquinta.
If we were to be betting we could probably guess that he’s going to shoot right from the locker room right at the start of round one like he did in the Al Iaquinta fight. There’s probably going to be a low single coming right away. I find it hard to imagine that they have any plans for any exchanges on the feet. Not that he went for a whole lot of takedowns but he did start failing on his takedowns against Al Iaquinta and then he went back to that nice jab he was using in the fight. He’s rounding out his game. He’s with AKA, a very strong kickboxing background with [Javier] Mendez. I suppose they do have that as a ‘Plan B.
”Ringrost är inget problem för Conor McGregor”
I think it’s how you approach training. I think if your gym environment and how you train in the gym is very separate to how you compete then for sure there will be ring rust but if you are regularly putting yourself in stressful sparring situations, which is the best we can get in the gym environment, it more resembles competition then.
So, specifically very much for this training camp we had a lot of very intense training sessions, sparring sessions, it’s done in the environment he’s going to compete in. We even had spectators for a lot of the spars, so we’re trying to make the training environment as closely mimic the competition environment so there isn’t that much of a disconnect between the two of them.
Kavanagh är dock inte orolig över dagistanierns stående utan ser på fighten med realistiska ögon, det är markspelet de måste ’passa sig’ för.
He’s generally facing someone that he’s better on the feet and he’s picking them off and they’re trying to take him down. That’s been the standard fight that he’s had. Whether it’s Mendes or even the Eddie fight, a few times Eddie got him on the fence and was trying to take him down but this is against somebody that does that better than anybody that he’s face before. We have to be straight about that.
I think it’s going to be a lot of the positions that we’ve seen him in before but it’s against somebody who, like I said, is doing it at a very high level
Matchen äger rum den 6:e oktober på T-Mobile Arena i Las Vegas, men först skall de stå öga mot öga på presskonferensen går av stapeln ikväll 23:00, den kan ni ta del av här.
