Sist vi såg den före detta fjäder- och lättviktsmästaren, Conor McGregor (21-4 mma, 9-2 UFC), i UFC-oktagonen var när han förlorade mot den nuvarande lättviktsmästaren, Khabib Nurmagomedov (27-0 mma, 11-0 UFC), via neck crank i fjärde ronden på UFC 229.
Fel strategi
McGregor är övertygad om att han kan prestera mycket bättre i en kommande re-match och säger att han och hans team hade fel strategi i det första mötet med den obesegrade lättviktsmästaren. I en intervju med Tony Robbins (via MMAWeekly) utvecklar McGregor sitt resonemang i frågan:
“My whole approach in that camp — the injuries, the non-commitment, even the game plan, the tactics — I attack, I am an attacker and my attack defends. In this camp, the entire focus was defend, defend. So every round we would start in the training, I’d have my back against the fence. I’d have my back on the floor. I would always put myself in a vulnerable position and as the camp went on, we just became defensive, defensive. That’s never been what I do.”
McGregor, som har svårt att släppa det hela, fortsätter:
“It still irritates me to this day because the training partners I train with are heavy people. Like I said that Moldovan wrestler I broke my foot [against] is like a horse. He’s literally like a f*****g human horse and I’ve got an American Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion who trains with me, he was like 200 pounds. They’re big, big, boys but I was always on the defensive with them.”
Lärt av misstaget
Sedan förlusten har McGregor gått tillbaka till den mer aggressiva stil som fungerat bäst för honom i sin mma-karriär.
“Since the fight, I’ve gone back to training with them and I went with my internal dialogue. Not the external dialogue, the dialogue of ‘I can’t grapple with this man and he’s a Russian sambo guy and he’s wrestled bears since he was a kid’ and all this b*****t. That’s external. I let the external infiltrate my internal and it filtered into the fight. But after the bout, I went back and trained with these people and attacked and I mauled them.”
Nurmagomedov är bokad att försvara sitt bälte mot den nykrönte interimmästaren i lättvikt, Dustin Poirier (25-5-1 mma, 17-4-1 UFC), på UFC 242 i Abu Dhabi, i september härnäst.
