Flametop wrote:
He said that he didn’t take Khabib’s stand up fighting seriously and that the overhand right he got hit with changed the fight.
He’s right and it was obvious at the time, just like the time he got hit hard by Nate Diaz.
Nobody really takes Khabib's stand-up seriously. Although Khabib's stand up has definitely improved, it's gone from amateurish to only average. And that overhand right definitely changed the fight. It was the defining moment.
In any case, the next fight really needs to be Ferguson vs Khabib, that fight has to happen. It's kind of hard to see Khabib winning, but at the same time, it's hard to imagine him losing to anyone. Either way, Ferguson is a nightmare for Khabib. Both his cardio fitness and stand-up are on a different level to Khabib, plus on the ground he's lethal off his back and his submission skills are better than Khabib. Khabib's big advantage is his smothering wrestling which is obv. on level ten billion. Is that alone enough to put away Ferguson? Possibly, it has been for everyone else. But I want to find out, and Tony more than deserves the shot.
As far as a Conor rematch ... after the Al Iaquinta fight and Khabib's stand up defence was exposed as so poor, one eye-brow was raised on the forehead of basically every striker in the division. Conor's striking is so next-level when it comes to pin-point precision and power that you can't blame him for not taking his (stand up) preparation seriously. When Conor said he didn't take the training seriously, he didn't mean he was "slacking off". He meant he didn't take Khabib's stand-up seriously, and after the Al Iaquinta fight, nobody could blame him.
Conor McGregor wrote:
Round 2 he is running away around the cage before being blessed with a right hand that changed the course of the round, and the fight.
It was a nice shot. ...<snip> ... Well played. If I stay switched on and give his stand up even a little more respect, that right hand never gets close and we are talking completely different now. I gave his upright fighting no respect in preparation. No specific stand up spars whatsoever. Attacking grapplers/wrestlers only. That won’t happen again.
A Conor v Khabib rematch would definitely be interesting, just to see how Conor responds both in and out of the octagon. Does he keep going with the shit talk pre-fight? What does he do differently strategically during the fight? Even if it was exactly the same, Conor is always a threat standing and no matter what the Conor-haters want to believe, Conor could have ended that fight with one left at any stage, and the same would be true in a rematch.
But Ferguson not only deserves it more, he's also a bigger threat to Khabib than Conor is. I reckon Khabib v Ferguson is 50/50. Khabib v Conor and anything but another convincing Khabib win would be a surprise.