John Kavanagh is the head coach at SBG Ireland, which is the home to former two division UFC champion Conor McGregor.
McGregor is challenging UFC Lightweight Champion Khabib Nurmagomedov for the gold at UFC 229, which is starting to make Kavanagh think about how Nurmagomedov will react is he loses a round against McGregor.
“It is interesting fighting an unbeaten fighter,” Kavanagh said on The Mac Life. “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.”
It should be noted that Nurmagomedov has never officially lost a round in his twenty six fight professional MMA career.
Kavanagh would be the first to admit though that Nurmagomedov is starting to round out his MMA game a lot better.
“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,’” says Kavanagh.
UFC 229 takes place on Saturday, October 6 from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada with Khabib Nurmagomedov and Conor McGregor headlining. Fightful is providing live coverage of the event, with a post-show podcast to follow.
