Say what you want about Conor McGregor, but the man is batting an uncanny average when it comes to his predictions. Less than 24 hours after disaster struck UFC 189 and reigning featherweight champion Jose Aldo withdrew from the blockbuster event due to a rib injury, McGregor was quick to remind the world that he predicted this very thing throughout the pair’s global tour this past spring.
“I’ve been contemplating it since long before the rib injury,” McGregor said Wednesday on a media conference call. “Long before. As soon as the fight was announced, I’ve been contemplating it. I knew. Like I said before, the eyes never lie. Anytime I looked into that man’s eyes, I saw fear. I saw glass. So I anticipated he would not show up, and when he got his opportunity to pull, he pulled. It’s something I expected. But I don’t blame the man. I was going to f–king butcher him. Rip him limb from limb. I probably wouldn’t want to face that either, so it is what it is.”
While Aldo’s withdrawal was a devastating blow to an event on track to be the biggest of the summer, it wasn’t exactly surprising. News of the injury trickled out from the moment Nova Uniao training partner Alcides Nunes slipped and cracked Aldo last week with a misplaced spinning back kick to the ribs.
For a time, it appeared as though Aldo would still fight McGregor on July 11. The UFC even published a statement diminishing the injury as nothing more than bruised ribs, and president Dana White on Tuesday listed off a number of fighters who competed with similar injuries in an interview with MMAFighting.com.
It wasn’t to be though, and now McGregor will meet Chad Mendes in UFC 189’s main event for the interim featherweight title.
“If a man p–sies out, and he has p–sied out time and time again, he’s pulled out of contests time and time again — I mean, the medical reports state that he is fit to fight, so there’s no more questioning,” McGregor said of Aldo. “You’re fit to fight, and you’re not going to fight. The belt, rightfully, should be stripped and this is for the real featherweight belt.
“This is the McGregor show. People are showing up to see me. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Jose or Chad. It would’ve been nice if Jose didn’t p—y out, but we’ll take the substitute. We’ll take the B-level guy and we’ll still break records with this.”
Unfortunately for Aldo, the withdrawal from UFC 189 is far from an isolated incident. The champion has a long and frustrating history of injury dropouts, having pulled out of five title fights over the course of his UFC tenure — a fact which drew the ire of White on Tuesday, and wasn’t lost on McGregor when he considered his options moving forward.
“It’s the McGregor division now,” McGregor said. “[Aldo] bottled it. He went running. It’s on my call now. So if he wants to come back with his tail between his legs, that’s no problem. He can come back. We can do a stadium in Dublin.
“But I don’t know whether he will be back. Like I said, he’s gone running, and I don’t think he’ll be back.”