The upcoming trilogy fight between Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier at UFC 264 has the entire fight sports community excited and attempting to predict how the decider will pan out.
McGregor won their first encounter back in 2014 via first-round stoppage on his path to superstardom, only to be halted in the second by 'The Diamond' in January of this year when they ran it back.
Former undefeated UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, who has conquered both men, no doubt has intensive insight into the strengths of weaknesses of each man from his dominant run in the Octagon prior to his retirement last year — as does the entirety of his dedicated coaching team.
Javier Mendez served on that team for eight years, and gave MyBettingSites a detailed breakdown on how he sees Poirier-McGregor 3 unfolding.
"Conor is gonna come in different, he’s going to come in a different fighter," he said. "He will be a much more mature fighter from the last bout. But he will maybe not be as confident as he was last time, because then he was overconfident and this time he’s going to come in with vengeance.
"We’ll see whether he has enough to deter Poirier because Dustin in my opinion felt what Conor had when he got hit with that really good shot — and it didn’t do anything to him. Dustin just became stronger, so I don’t know if Dustin is gonna go right at him off the bat. That’s a good possibility.
"It’s a different fight, it’s gonna be a better fight. If I had to favourite anybody I’d probably favour Dustin, but you can never count Conor out."
So, who does Mendez back to win the series 2-1?
"Dustin wins by basically breaking Conor down," he continued. "I can see that happening. Dustin comes in and goes at him, breaks him down, break his will. That’s how I see it happening.
"Dustin comes in and just breaks him down, takes what he has and more or less says ‘here, I’m giving it to you back two-fold.’"
Nonetheless, he also believes there is one key alteration 'The Notorious' can make in order to give himself a chance of avoiding that fate."All he needs to do is don’t stay in that karate stance," said Mendez. "The only thing he needs to adjust is his leg calf kicking checking, he doesn’t need to change anything else other than that. That’ll change the fight in itself.
"That calf kicking changed everything, you could see how it affected him. All of a sudden he couldn’t really do what he wanted to do because his body was betraying him - his legs weren’t moving in the way that he wanted them to move.
"That small adjustment could have a huge impact, 100 percent. The only issue is that Dustin took his best shot and I think that gave him a lot of confidence, so Dustin might just come in there and break him anyway."
McGregor's defeat to Poirier had some questioning his commitment to the sport having made a fortune in business ventures elsewhere as well as his money-spinning boxing crossover against Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Would another defeat make him ponder retirement? Probably, says Mendez, but he nonetheless backs the Irishman to still finish his MMA career on his own terms.
"If he did lose a second time, I think he would really question if he really needs this or if he still has it," Mendez explained. "So yeah, it could definitely make him think about it.
"But he’s a real fighter too, so if he does lose again he’ll probably say ‘I'm not leaving the sport like this’ because guys that are able to gain the type of attention he does, they’re going to want to end it on a good note.
"He’s still young too, so he’s not going to want to end it on a bad note, so that’s a possibility. If he does lose, he may not just be finished because he’s too much of a fighter."