Dustin Poirier explains why he had to bite Michael Chandler in their fight.
Dustin Poirier took on Michael Chandler on the main card of the UFC 281 event this past weekend. The card was massive and with 11 finishes on the night, it was arguably one of the greatest UFC events of all time. The bout between Poirier and Chandler was a bloody back-and-forth war that saw Poirier come out on top when he sunk in a rear naked choke in the third round.
Following the conclusion of the fight, both men attended the post-fight presser. They explained that there were some words exchanged in the cage after the fight was called. Chandler explained that Poirier accused him of putting his hands in his mouth and blowing blood into his eyes, which he said was all accidental. Poirier had another opinion on that.
“I don’t care what the f-ck the guy says in interviews or the guy he’s trying to portray. He 100 percent did,” he said on The MMA Hour. “When I was elbow I was calling him a nasty motherf–ker. That’s what I kept telling him. I can hear him blow his nose. He did it hard. Let me tell you this, if you go back and watch the replay of the blood falling out of his nose, yeah, it was leaking, it might be broken, whatever, but when he got it lined up where he wanted it, those huge globs that come out, they didn’t fall out. He forced them out. And it’s fighting, its war.”
Dustin Poirier called Michael Chandler a dirty fighter after their bout
Poirier believed that Chandler knew exactly what he was doing and called him a dirty fighter afterward. There was some bad blood leading up to the fight and after it seems that all is not resolved. Poirier addressed the fact that Chandler had his fingers in his mouth at one point and explained how he defended such a thing.
“It doesn’t hurt but the leverage you get on that grip, you know, he had his fingers on my top teeth where my mouth guard is so he kind of pulled, tried to get my neck up to lock in the choke. It’s a lot of that,” he said. “The leverage you get from gripping, that is hard for me to keep my chin down,” he said. “But I bit the sh-t out of his fingers, yeah, but I have my mouth guard and so only my bottom teeth could get him.”
Poirier will continue to make his way up the lightweight rankings in hopes of another title shot. He is now sitting in the number two spot in the rankings. The loss did not hurt Chandler much as he remains in the number five spot in the rankings. Perhaps these two will meet in the cage again one day.