Kavanagh questions Khabib’s confidence after he loses a round

Conor McGregor’s coach, SBGi founder John Kavanagh spoke recently about the fight between Notorious and former UFC lightweight and featherweight champ Conor McGregor at UFC 229 on October 6, at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Eagle is bigger, a better wrestler, and undefeated. However, Kavanagh argues that having a pristine record could be a negative.

It is interesting fighting an unbeaten fighter, said Kavanagh as transcribed by Jed Meshew for MMA Fighting. I’ve had a lot of my guys that went a long time unbeaten and then they have the loss. It’s always interesting to see, in that fight where they had their first loss, when things start to go wrong. It’s an unusual feeling for them and sometimes they struggle to deal with that.

I don’t think Khabib has lost a single round in his UFC career. If you do lose a round are you going to be able to come back out with that same level of confidence in the next round? There’s a lot of interesting things to be played out in this fight.

Now with Khabib, he probably brings more [dimensions to prepare for] than even Nate because with Khabib, he will throw shots. His last fight was mostly stand-up after the first round. But yes, if we were to be betting we could probably guess that he’s going to shoot right from the locker room right at the start of round one like he did in the Al Iaquinta fight. There’s probably going to be a low single coming right away. I find it hard to imagine that they have any plans for any exchanges on the feet. Not that he went for a whole lot of takedowns but he did start failing on his takedowns against Al Iaquinta and then he went back to that nice jab he was using in the fight. He’s rounding out his game. He’s with AKA, a very strong kickboxing background with [Javier] Mendez. I suppose they do have that as a ‘Plan B.’

McGregor has not fought in nearly two years, but again, the coach has an answer.

I think it’s how you approach training, Kavanagh said. I think if your gym environment and how you train in the gym is very separate to how you compete then for sure there will be ring rust but if you are regularly putting yourself in stressful sparring situations, which is the best we can get in the gym environment, it more resembles competition then.

So, specifically very much for this training camp we had a lot of very intense training sessions, sparring sessions, it’s done in the environment he’s going to compete in. We even had spectators for a lot of the spars, so we’re trying to make the training environment as closely mimic the competition environment so there isn’t that much of a disconnect between the two of them.

He’s generally facing someone that he’s better on the feet and he’s picking them off and they’re trying to take him down,” said the coach. “That’s been the standard fight that he’s had. Whether it’s Mendes or even the Eddie fight, a few times Eddie got him on the fence and was trying to take him down but this is against somebody that does that better than anybody that he’s face before. We have to be straight about that. I think it’s going to be a lot of the positions that we’ve seen him in before but it’s against somebody who, like I said, is doing it at a very high level.