UFC 242: Conor McGregor could have killed old man he punched in pub, says Khabib Nurmagomedov
- UFC lightweight champion reignites feud with Irishman ahead of Dustin Poirier bout – ‘I don’t like this guy because he punches old people’
- ‘If you punch someone and he goes down, he can die. This just shows how he [McGregor] changes with money’
“I don’t like this guy”, Khabib said in Abu Dhabi ahead of his UFC 242 title fight against Dustin Poirier. “Because he punches old people, he’s lost his mind. Sometimes, when you‘re hungry you are different. When you have money, you become different and you have to control your emotions, you’re everything because you are a big star now.
“How can you punch old people when you are one of the best fighters in the world? You can touch people and this guy can die you know. OK, if you punch someone and he goes down, he can die. You have to control, your arms, legs, mind, mental, emotional, everything. This just shows how he changes with money.”
“Notorious” has not fought since his fourth-round submission loss last October to lightweight champion Khabib – who served a nine-month suspension after jumping out of the Octagon to attack McGregor’s jiu-jitsu coach Dillon Danis after the fight.
McGregor has said he wanted a rematch, despite being dominated by the Russian. The bout was the highest-grossing UFC pay-per-view of all time with 2.4 million buys, fuelled by bad blood after McGregor threw a metal dolley at the window of a bus containing fighters including Khabib.
“I told people my plan. I went into the cage, made him tired, change his face, smash his face and I did everything that I said,” Khabib added. “But after everything he said, he didn’t do nothing and this is the big difference between us.
“You can talk and if you don’t do anything, you have to shut up. But it’s like I said, I did everything I said I would inside the cage and now he talks like he did something.
“But inside the cage he just talk about ‘This is just business’. This shows me how weak he is on the mental. If this is just business, I am just going to choke him out and leave him alone.”
