Islam Makhachev’s coach is hoping some trash talk from Conor McGregor builds into an eventual fight so his pupil can beat down the loud-mouthed Irish sports star.
Conor McGregor was right about Islam Makhachev suffering through a bad bout of staph leading into UFC 302. But according to Makhachev’s head coach Javier Mendez, the staph was old news by the time “The Notorious” pointing it out.”
In a new interview with Red Corner MMA, the AKA leader discussed Makhachev’s tough training camp en route to defeating Dustin Poirier via submission in the fifth round of their lightweight title fight (watch the highlights here).
“When I got to camp almost a month ago, Islam was not training because he had this big nasty staph infection,” Mendez said. “He said this camp was a very bad camp for him. But from my perspective, since I was there the last half of the camp, it was a great camp. Everything was great.”
“When Khabib showed up, everything got even better. You know, Khabib is the leader. I’m more the mentor role now. Khabib took over the leadership role, and every department taking care of the guys, making sure when they went to sleep, etcetera, etcetera. So everything went perfect. The the staph infection did not affect [Islam] whatsoever. He was not on antibiotics the week of the fight, so we cannot use that as anything. He was perfectly fine.”
As for the drama with Conor McGregor, none of it bothered Team Makhachev because Islam had already recovered from the staph infection.
“He brought that staph up, which is very observant on his part, to be honest with you,” Mendez admitted. “Very observant on his part. The only thing is he observed it way too late. At the time he mentioned that, it was already 3 weeks past.”
And Mac calling them a bunch of “scruffy f—s” may eventually build into another multi-million dollar chance to beat Conor up. That’s something Mendez would love to see.
“Conor goes on a rant, starting to create drama with Islam,” he said. “Which is kinda good because Conor’s the the kinda guy you want to to root against or root for, regardless. Everybody wants to see him. Me, I wanna see him get beat by Islam. So for me, him doing what he’s doing is causing a lot of attention. So there would be nothing better for me and Khabib than to have Islam have a fight with [Conor] somewhere down the line.”