The newly crowned interim Featherweight champion Conor McGregor’s head trainer, John Kavanagh has revealed that, Conor did not even do one single round of MMA training or wrestling while prepping for his title main event match against Chad Mendes. And this was because of his knee injury woes which hadn’t healed completely until about two weeks before the PPV event.
John Kavanagh said:
"Well, it's not come up yet, but I am going to tell you. We didn't do one live round of MMA training or wrestling for this training camp because Conor had an injury. We weren't able to train at full pace. I've gotta be honest, when we were walking out to this fight it was in the back of my mind that we haven't done a single round of live wrestling. I had my eyebrows raised and thought, 'let's see what happens.' And he, Conor, was laughing. The injury is healed now, but it wasn't until about two weeks before the fight that we felt it was 100 percent. But, we still didn't want to do full pace to exasperate it. Really, the first round of full wrestling was done in that fight. His timing a little bit on the sprawl and dealing with the shot was not quite there. It started getting better as the fight went on. Do I think a rematch if it does happen down the line would be different? Yes, for both of them. I don't want to go into the injury too much, it's fine now. That was the first full test on the knee and he flew through it. He was able to deal with some positions. There were some scrambles, there was a lot of wrestling and it held up and there's nothing wrong. So we're 100 percent confident that it's perfect now."
According to Kavanagh, McGregor is one true Champion, as he had exhibited great valor even with an Injury two weeks prior to his big fight. As he said:
"For Conor to have done what he did and accepted that change, I think that showed a championship mentality. I feel like he's the champion. He's done pretty special things in the UFC in quite a short period of time. He's been willing to accept any challenge. I don't know if there's many fighters with what he had in front of him with two weeks notice would have accepted [it]."
In order to unify his titles McGregor has to take on Jose Aldo, which is expected to happen early 2016. Speaking about Aldo, he spoke on a radio show and said that he’ll back training in two weeks and is very focused on defeating the Irishman. His words:
"I'm still recovering, should be back to training in two weeks, As soon as the doctor clears me, I'll be back to training. We will run through him no matter when the fight happens, but his time will come. When it does, you can be sure we will smash him."
We’ll keep you updated on McGregor and Aldo. Stay tuned for more news.
(Source: mmamania)
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