Anthony Smith doesn’t think Conor McGregor’s pre-fight injury claim should be a part of the post-UFC 264 narrative.
McGregor (22-6 MMA, 10-4 UFC) broke his left tibia and fibula in a first-round TKO loss to Dustin Poirier in the main event, with doctors stopping the fight at the end of the opening frame. McGregor suffered the injury in the closing seconds of the round, which he was down 10-8 on two of the judges’ scorecards.
An irate McGregor deemed Poirier’s win as “illegitimate,” later revealing that he went into the fight with stress fractures in his leg. He posted images of an X-ray, as well as taped-up ankles while in practice, claiming that both the UFC and the Nevada Athletic Commission already knew about his pre-existing injury. Dana White later said that McGregor has chronic arthritis in his ankles, which has given him issues throughout the years. But Smith, a former UFC light heavyweight title challenger and current analyst, isn’t buying McGregor’s excuse.
“Everyone who loses has an excuse,” Smith said on SiriusXM’s Fight Nation. “It’s new for Conor to be like that. I’m not the excuses guy, but in my own circle, all my friends know what’s going on. They know pre, and they know post. Like, ‘I know you’re never gonna say this, but what was going on here? I know you’ll never say this publicly because you don’t make excuses,’ and I’ll absolutely tell my friends what’s going on. You knew that my hand was broken going into the Glover (Teixeira) fight, and I never said anything about it because it’s not an excuse. Glover probably had a broken hand. We all are injured.
“Going into the Jimmy Crute fight, I can talk about it because I won – my leg was f*cked. Totally f*cked. … I couldn’t kick almost the entire training camp. I had this huge, huge hematoma, and I’m lucky enough the commission didn’t catch it, because I don’t know if they would have let me fight. The point of that is we’re all banged up going in. The sport is very hard, and you put your body – the fight’s the easiest part. Making it through a training camp as uninjured as possible is the tough part.”
McGregor’s leg break might have been a blessing in disguise. Losing to Poirier (28-6 MMA, 20-5 UFC) twice in a row should have put an end to their rivalry, but the injury now has raised questions about how the rest of the fight would have played out, despite the fact that he was down big in Round 1. Both White and Poirier seemed open to the idea of a fourth fight, and Smith thinks McGregor bringing his pre-fight injury to light only increases his chances.
“I would say Conor wasn’t any more hurt than Dustin was going into that fight,” Smith added. “That’s not me saying Conor wasn’t banged up or his legs weren’t bothering him or his shin wasn’t cracked up or whatever, but he wasn’t any more injured than Dustin Poirier was, and that’s my perspective at it from an athlete. It’s easy for a fan or someone who has never done it to say, ‘Oh, he was hurt.’
“We’re all hurt. Every single one of us, every single time we fight, there’s not one person that can ever say they go in 100 percent healthy. So his excuses are very invalid to me. To the general public, it makes sense that they people would buy into that excuse, but Conor knows that all of us don’t buy it because we’re all hurt too. That’s kind of how I look at it, but he’s not lobbying to us. It’s to the general public, the buyers, the pay-per-view buyers. Those are the people he needs to convince, but he knows he’s never gonna convince us (fighters).”
Conor McGregor’s excuses for losing to Dustin Poirier ‘are very invalid’ to Anthony Smith
