Former UFC featherweight and lightweight champion Conor McGregor’s return is expected to come soon, and while many expect him to challenge 155-pound champ Khabib Nurmagomedov upon his return, the Irishman’s coach would prefer a different match-up.
Speaking to Robin Black this past weekend, John Kavanagh revealed that despite the fight with The Eagle looming, he’d prefer McGregor to partake in a trilogy bout with Nate Diaz (via MMA Fighting):
“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 straight forward.”
While seeing McGregor walk through men with similar size to him at 145 and 155 pounds is great, Kavanagh doesn’t get as excited for those match-ups as much as he would for a bout that would challenge his star pupil. Not to mention that the ultimate competitor came out of The Notorious One after his first loss to Diaz:
”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.”
Do you think that McGregor will fight Nurmagomedov next? Or will he opt for a Diaz trilogy fight instead? Have your say in the comments!
