We’re just one week away from the UFC 229 superfight between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov, set to go down at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. And while we’re happy the fight is going down in Vegas and not New York where the athletic commission likes to take a pound of flesh off every event, that didn’t stop Khabib Nurmagomedov from flaming off the UFC 209 card in March of 2017.
he now-lightweight champion ended up in the hospital after a bad weight cut, and while he’s managed to make it into the cage without issue for his last two performances, there’s still a little worry from fans and even Conor McGregor’s team that we could see more weight issues for this big fight.
“It could be a concern, yeah. It has happened before,” McGregor’s striking coach Owen Roddy said during an appearance on MMA Fighting’s Eurobash podcast. “Don’t focus on what is out of your control, you can only focus on what you have control over. We don’t know what could happen, anything could happen.”
McGregor, of course, is used to anything happening before his fights. The number of fight week opponent changes the former double champ has agreed to is staggering.
“We had that happen with Aldo a couple of years back, we had a last-minute change with Mendes,” Roddy continued. “It didn’t really affect us. We went straight back in, made a couple of minor adjustments, we went in and we done what we needed to do. Anything can happen in the fight game, but we can only focus on what we have control over and that’s getting Conor prepared, getting him focused on getting back in the cage and doing what he does best — that’s what we’re focusing on.”
That’s always comforting. Khabib could get hit by a bus (ironic) the day before the fight and McGregor would still face whoever the UFC could put across from him. As we saw in the Mendes fight, a blown knee wasn’t enough to take him off the card. McGregor’s there to fight. As for ‘pull out merchant’ Khabib? He seems to have turned a corner after the aforementioned hospitalization and various injuries. Let’s hope he can extend his scheduled fight streak to three bouts.
Source : mmamania
