Prior to finishing Benoit Saint-Denis at UFC 299 back in March, former interim lightweight champion Dustin Poirier appeared to be mildly obsessed with the guillotine submission, which failed to stop the lightweight “God of War.”
So “The Diamond” had to settle for a second-round knockout.
“Don’t be silly, jump the silly,” Poirier wrote on Twitter after the bout, leading fans to question why the former featherweight was hellbent on locking down the popular submission hold.
“He puts a lot of guys to sleep in the gym, to be honest,” coach Mike Brown told MMA Fighting. “He does have a very good one. He just hasn’t hit them in the fight.”
It hasn’t been for a lack of trying.
Poirier clamped down a guillotine on former UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov when they went to war at UFC 242 — but “The Eagle” may have baited “The Diamond” with the intention of draining his arm strength and conditioning.
Watch the sequence unfold in the embedded video above.
The since-retired Nurmagomedov will corner current lightweight champion Islam Makhachev atop the UFC 302 pay-per-view (PPV) event this Sat. night (June 1, 2024) at Prudential Center in Newark, NJ, where Poirier will undoubtedly look to “jump the gilly.”
“We will start and I will try to take him down,” Makhachev told Yahoo Sports. “He will try to get me in a guillotine (choke). I will defend the guillotine. I will give him a couple punches. He will give his back, then I will finish. One day maybe, I hope (Poirier) will finish his guillotine on someone. But it’s not going to be me.”
We’ll find out this weekend in “The Garden State.”
MMAmania.com will deliver LIVE round-by-round, blow-by-blow coverage of the entire UFC 302 fight card RIGHT HERE, starting with the early ESPN+ “Prelims” matches at 6 p.m. ET, followed by the remaining undercard balance on ESPN2/ESPN+ at 8 p.m. ET, before the PPV main card start time at 10 p.m. ET on ESPN+ PPV.
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