Conor's coach talks calf kicks

Conor McGregor‘s head coach, SBGi founder John Kavanagh, appeared recently on The Ariel Helwani show, and discussed the calf kicks that led to the crushing loss vs. Dustin Poirier in the main event of UFC 257 on Saturday night.

He does so much sparring that you hope that there’s not going to be ring rust, because he’s getting the rounds in, said Kavanagh. But again, somewhat ironically, this particular technique is one that is almost impossible to replicate.

The fact that Dustin threw it is not that surprising. It was certainly part of our training, to deal with leg kicks. How devastating a technique it was somewhat caught us out. In the gym, when you’re throwing that technique, you’re not trying to kick your partner as hard as you possibly can, and you’re also wearing shin pads, kick pads. … You can build up a false confidence – ‘I feel it, but it’s not that bad.’ Then it’s only in fighting that you get tiny gloves and no shin pads.

From October 2018, coming up two-and-a-half years almost, he had 40 seconds of feeling what kicks feel like with no pads on, and punches with four-ounce gloves. So, yeah, that is one thing you cannot replicate.

McGregor was taken down in Round 1, but stood back up to win It 10-9, and did not appear at all to be exhausted.

I took a lot of positivity from it, said Kavanagh. He’s clearly not feeling even the beginning of tiredness. I felt at the end of Round 1, this is probably going to be a long fight, because he landed a couple of shots. I thought there was once or twice where Dustin wobbled a little bit, so the finish would come, but let’s not chase it. Let’s not get too over-excited, and if we’re going to be doing three, four, five rounds, it’s nice to see at the end of Round 1 that he doesn’t even have to sit down.

I thought by the end of Round 1, that’s kind of it now for takedowns. Now it’s a kickboxing battle, and the shots I saw from Round 1, Conor got the better of him. So, going into the second I thought, energy’s great, probably takedown attempts are if not over, Conor’s very switched on … So we’re going to start going into a nice kickboxing battle, and Conor’s one of the best in the world at that. But then those damn, pesky, peroneal nerve kicks.

It’s one of those techniques that really two or three, maybe maximum four proper, clean connections, and that’s it. If anybody’s experienced cracking your elbow and you hit that funny nerve – that electric shock you get is similar. It’s nerve damage rather than like a sore muscle or a body shot, or something you can get through, you know? You just can’t.

It’s on or it’s off. The bottom half of the leg is off, and when he kind of slipped the shot and Dustin caught him with a nice uppercut, he went to transfer his body weight onto the right leg, and it just gave [out], and he just went down, and that was the end of that. So we definitely have to fix that.

We’re, as usual, an obsessive personality. Because it was over before lunchtime, we had the day together to talk about it. We had discussed them in the training camp. Like I said, not surprised by the kicks being thrown, but very surprised by the effectiveness of the technique. So we will add it to our arsenal.

I thought we did well in pretty much every other part of the fight. I would have loved to have seen a couple more rounds, some grappling exchanges, and some more punches back and forward, because he needs more time in the cage. What did we get? Seven-and-a-half minutes in that fight? So we’re racking up the minutes. I hope there’s a lot more minutes this year.