“The Notorious” Conor McGregor seems to have subtly doubled down on his fight with Dustin Poirier being off.
Over the past two days, Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier have engaged in a fiery public dispute over the $500,000 donation that McGregor promised yet never sent to Poirier’s Good Fight Foundation. Poirier claims that he was given the cold shoulder by McGregor’s team whenever he reached out to finalize the donation, and McGregor responded by stating he was still waiting to receive plans from Poirier’s team on how his money would be spent.
Things soon escalated to the point where McGregor classified Poirier as an “inbred hillbilly” with a blinking problem and, more relevantly, pulled the plug on their trilogy fight scheduled for UFC 264 on July 10. Now that a day has passed, it doesn’t seem as though the Irish superstar is having second thoughts about his declaration that the trilogy fight is off. Instead, he used a play on words to double down on the cancellation while apparently issuing an open challenge:
“Looking to start the foundations of a good fight you guys, who’s in?” McGregor tweeted.
One thing we’ve learned about booking Conor McGregor in a fight over the years is that there will never be a shortage of takers. Fighters of all walks of life will almost certainly be coming out of the woodwork to throw their name into the hat to replace Dustin Poirier: active, retired, and from multiple weight classes. A Conor McGregor open challenge is something like a lottery raffle considering how eager fighters have historically been to fight him and how much money and fulfillment stands to be had from the red panty night.
We’ll keep you posted if something actually comes from this open challenge or if this was just the Irishman’s way of taunting Dustin Poirier with a jabbing pun while attempting to wield power over him. Even Conor McGregor would have a hard time just walking away from a TKO loss as if nothing happened, though, so a trilogy fight against Poirier is certainly not charity, and both fighters stand a lot to gain from donating their time into a third fight to settle a score that has just turned personal.
Who would you like to see Conor McGregor fight next?
