5 reasons why Conor McGregor will beat Khabib Nurmagomedov at UFC 229

#4: Khabib might come in too emotionally charged

Khabib and Conor were friendly here - but is Khabib now too emotionally charged?

Unless you’ve had your head buried under a rock for the last year, you probably know how this fight was put together – but let’s look at it again anyway.

Back in April, Khabib was booked to fight Tony Ferguson at UFC 223 for the UFC Lightweight title, which had been stripped from McGregor due to his long absence. But in the build to that event, Nurmagomedov confronted McGregor’s teammate Artem Lobov and threatened him after he’d claimed Conor was still the “real” champion.

And so McGregor decided to bring a crew with him to Brooklyn, where the event was taking place, and launched an attack on a bus containing Khabib and some other UFC fighters – including throwing a metal dolly through the window. After the incident Khabib didn’t seem shaken, simply stating that McGregor should “name the location” and then they’d fight.

Well, now the fight is on – but who has the emotional upper hand? If Conor was at all shaken by Nurmagomedov threatening his friend and teammate, he dealt with that with the attack on the bus. Suddenly, it’s now Khabib who is the angry one gunning for revenge. And that’s a dangerous place to be in terms of a fight like this.

It’s been proven time after time that fighters who come into the Octagon too emotionally charged often get themselves into trouble. Look at Jose Aldo, who came in fired up against McGregor, charged forward uncharacteristically and was then knocked out.

Or Donald Cerrone, who worked himself up for a fight with Nate Diaz to the point where he was thoroughly ineffective and was easily beaten.

Khabib would do well to put all of the events leading up to the fight into the back of his mind and forget about Conor’s head games. But if he can’t do that – and the pre-fight hype suggests he may not be able to – then he might be playing into McGregor’s hands.