Midnight Mania! John Kavanagh says McGregor was “over emotional” at Bellator 187

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Conor McGregor got into trouble over the weekend when he jumped into the cage to congratulate a teammate on a knockout win. When the referee, Marc Goddard, tried to clear the cage, McGregor went after him and gave him a shove, shouting in his face, then later slapped an official for trying to get him off the top of the cage wall.

Reports indicate McGregor was taken off UFC 219 at year’s end because of the incident; McGregor himself remains aggressively unapologetic. His coach, John Kavanagh, went on The Six-O’clock Show in Ireland and discussed the incident, saying that McGregor was over-emotional because of the bond he felt with his teammate.

Transcript via MMAFighting.com’s Peter Carroll:

“He lost fast and hard in both his UFC fights and was dropped by the UFC and then he fought on Bellator.

“So, when you’re seeing someone that you’re that close with, with two bad defeats and then has a great victory in front of his hometown crowd…he got a bit emotional, jumped in and he didn’t realize that the fight had no actually been called.

“He thought when he knocked the guy down it was over, but it was actually just the end of the round. The fight wasn’t over.

“The referee was trying to tell him that the fight was over. It was pretty obvious it was over, in his defense. He was a little bit over emotional there, but you sort of understand when you know his and Charlie’s relationship over the last number of years.”

The bond between brothers was exactly the explanation McGregor himself gave when he used a homophobic slur to comfort another teammate, Artem Lobov, after Lobov’s loss at UFC Gdansk. Marc Goddard also told McGregor, who was shouting loudly from outside the Octagon, to sit down during Lobov’s bout, sparking the bad blood that appeared to affect McGregor’s actions at Bellator 187.

“It’s the personal relationship that the two of them share,” Kavanagh said.

“It’s like soccer players when they score goals and you see them running around and then some will go like this.

“It’s funny because Conor wouldn’t even do that for his own victory. He gets more involved when it’s his teammates’, his friends’, victories.”

In my last Midnight Mania on Friday, I explored the possibility McGregor’s actions represent a familiar pattern of self-destructive behavior we see with celebrities who have “made it” and don’t have a suitable outlet for their energy. Kavanagh tells a different story; he would have us believe it is merely McGregor getting too emotionally invested in his teammate’s success. Let us hope he is right.

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