“He’s all over the place… I suppose in a week or two we’ll sit down and assess what went right [and] what went wrong.”
After weeks upon weeks of being in each other’s faces, Conor McGregor and John Kavanagh went their separate ways after UFC 229.
McGregor was defeated by lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov and then assaulted by several members of the Dagestani’s team inside The Octagon. The first act – his submission – rankled him more than being set upon in the aftermath.
Backstage, and on social media, McGregor called for an immediate rematch. For hours after the fight, that was McGregor’s focus but his other commitments have taken precedence in the past few days.
Kavanagh, his coach, made an interesting admission when he joined Ariel Helwani on Ariel & The Bad Guy. He said:
“This may actually surprise you but I haven’t spoken to Conor since the fight
“We had a couple of texts back and forward. So, after the fight he went home. I went home as well. We were in separate houses. So I was there with Artem [Lobov], Pete [Queally] and Orlagh [Hunter]. We just stayed up Saturday night, chatting.
“There were a couple of texts back and forward with Conor – saying, oh I could have done this, I could have done that – then on the Sunday I ended up going out for a little bit with Dillon [Danis] and a couple of guys from Paradigm.”
Kavanagh, as he retraced his steps from the Sunday, remembered that he had, in fact, seen McGregor… after getting past his security detail.
“I bumped into him on Sunday night at around 1am,” he said. “He was sitting with his family and I was leaving through the hotel. We got to this one area and a lot of security starting pushing me away…
“I spotted Conor and was like, ‘Is that Conor McGregor?!’
“They were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, you can’t go there’.
“And Conor spotted me and said, ‘Yeah, that’s my coach’. So I went in and it was just like ‘How are you?’ We didn’t really talk about the fight. He was sitting with his mother and I said hello to his mam and dad and left. That was it. I didn’t see him Monday and I left on Tuesday.”
Asked by Helwani if that lack of post-fight communication was normal, Kavanagh said, “Not hugely unusual… not massively. I like to leave the fighter alone and let them decompress.”
Kavanagh added that McGregor set off, soon after the fight, on a whistle-stop tour around America to promote his whiskey. He conceded that the background noise and obligations for McGregor is something that must be juggled.
“It’s always been a concern, but that’s what made him who he is… we’re always vying for his attention.”
Kavanagh says McGregor was focused on the Khabib fight entirely when he was in training and he believes he has a mind capable of doing that and also dealing with his various business interests.
Perhaps, if there is a rematch, ‘The Notorious’ should look into getting away from it all in Iceland – as he has done in the past – for a while.
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