Last weekend, SBG Ireland head coach John Kavanagh assured that the potential fight between two-division champion Conor Mcgregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov happens in 2018. But the coach said if he had to pick, Khabib wouldn’t be the next fight for Irishman.
During chitchat with (MMANytt), Kavanagh said, Nurmagomedov fight is in the pipeline, but personally, Nate Diaz is my favorite fight. (Via MMAFighting)
“Nate Diaz is my favorite fight, by the way,” Kavanagh said. “If I could pick a fight for the next one it would be that trilogy. I realize it’s not the fan-favorite. The fan favorite, without a close second, is the Khabib fight, but for me, it’s the Nate Diaz rematch and I think the Khabib fight is a lot more straightforward.”
Mcgregor and Nate met twice inside the Octagon back in 2016. In the first outing, Diaz beat McGregor at UFC 196 via submission as a short-notice replacement and then McGregor went on to defeat him in the rematch at UFC 202. The rematch was hard-fought majority decision for McGregor. Both showdowns were two of the biggest pay-per-view events in UFC history. According to Kavanagh, stylistic challenges makes the Diaz fight more intriguing to him for Mcgregor.
”For me, he had already lost to him, it’s a bigger guy, Conor’s skill set is shutting people’s consciousness off and he’s impossible – a freaking Homer Simpson head, he just keeps moving forward,” Kavanagh said. “Conor’s bravery in [the fight], I’ve seen Conor fight a lot of people that he’s able to walk through and that’s great, it’s fun and you raise a belt, but it doesn’t it doesn’t really excite me that much, not really. But that fight, if you’d been around him, by the time he’d got backstage [after losing the first Diaz fight], we were watching that night, and then the next morning he was not off the phone until Lorenzo and Dana said that would be his next fight.”
Irishman and Diaz, hasn’t set foot inside the Octagon since 2106, but both UFC star made headlines for all the wrong reasons in recent time. Currently, Mcgregor’s team negotiating a plea deal so he can avoid jail time for his antics at UFC 223 media day and is scheduled to appear back in court in Brooklyn on July 26th. Diaz reportedly linked to fighting against Georges St-Pierre at UFC 227 in LA, but as of this writing, nothing comes to fruition.
Do you think we can see Mcgregor vs. Diaz trilogy down the road?
