Dustin Poirier, Conor McGregor make weight ahead of UFC 264. With both fighters finally weighing their UFC 2, the last obstacle to the final battle between Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier was cleared. The two men weighed 156 for the lightweight fight held in Las Vegas on Saturday.
The weigh-in procedure on Friday afternoon was a little dramatic, with the two guys weighing in individually. This was after Thursday’s Press Conference, which concluded with McGregor trying to kick Poirier during their scheduled layover. The battle for the trilogy, a significant shift after their January return, was made further hostile by McGregor.
We are approaching the last act of one of the greatest trilogies in UFC history, Dustin Poirier against Conor McGregor, where the first and second fights were quite different from each other. Still, there were also many parallels that we will discuss later in the breakdown.
I already made a breakdown for Dustin going into the second fight, where he was coming off a loss from the first one. He pretty much did a lot of what I spoke about and came out victorious because Conor is now on the losing end I’m going to spend this breakdown talking about what does Conor McGregor need to do to be victorious in the rubber match because honestly, I don’t see Dustin Poirier defying Conor.
He merely fine-tuned some of his tactics, such as being a little bit more countering than aggressive. Some of the small stuff, whereas Conor McGregor changed a lot from the first fight to the second, from a karate stance to a boxing stance to the manner, he was delivering blows. The vast majority of his strikes in the second fight were punches. In contrast, he used successful kicks to line up his punches very differently from Conor Mcgregor in the first fight. Honestly, the way he’ll evolve in the third fight is by reverting back to his past self. His boxing is excellent; his punching form his power, everything in that sense, actually is getting better.
Looking at his boxing skills in the second fight with Dustin Poirier, he is better as a boxer in MMA than he has ever been before. Still, he needs to bring back the kicks and the movement. He doesn’t necessarily need the stance, he doesn’t need the bladed sideways stance. Still, he needs to be a moving target specifically away from those leg kicks because the light kicks both landed.
Conor McGregor will face Dustin Poirier, and yes, Dustin used light kicks to great effect in the first fight. Conor had that karate stance, and he was moving around, which tells me that light kicks will be effective against Conor McGregor no matter what he tries to do unless he does something different that we’ve never seen before.
In the lightweight division, he’s been talking about knocking these guys out in the first exchange, first punch that lands, the same mindset he had when he fought at featherweight. Still, these guys are more durable, bigger, and so far, every single lightweight he’s fought hasn’t crumbled and gotten finished from some of the first punches he throws at them as the 145 pounders did.
Why does Conor need to throw kicks in this fight specifically more than ever before his kicks are generally very very powerful I think he’s falling in love with his punches rather than his kicks and there’s a huge possibility his kicks might be more effective in some of these fights than his punches are but generally speaking here these guys aren’t going away the way like his previous fights.
There is a wonderful example in the Nate Diaz rematch. Conor thought he’d knock out Nate Diaz in the first fight by just rushing forward and bulldozing through him, but it didn’t work, so he came into the second fight saying, “I’m expecting this to go; five rounds because I know how tough this guy is.” What happened in that fight was that Conor dropped him three times and hurt him many more times, and that’s probably how Conor will have to approach Dustin Poirier.
I believe Conor should control the space around Dustin Poirier’s right side, left side, and in front of him because, in the second fight, he had a difficult time controlling the space, and thus, the play was able to move a little bit better. Dustin also pushed Conor back; when he was pressured, Conor tried to control the space using his boxing rather than his kicks. Conor had this control in the first fight, and with those long-range kicks, Conor managed Dustin’s movement such that he didn’t want to stay on the centerline.
Conor will intercept him with a spinning heel kick. If Dustin wants to move out to his own right. Conor will block him with a left roundhouse, and as I said before, these kicks have tremendous power. You’ve probably seen Conor posting a bunch of training videos of him kicking the bag, and his kicks are looking extremely powerful. He’s lunging into these kicks, and I think he probably will show us some examples on the fight night.
