Rafael dos Anjos Almost Loses It Against Conor McGregor

“That was the idea when the fight was over”, said Aldo during a recent media scrum in Rio de Janeiro.

“We obviously did a couple of years, three years of work together”, O’Driscoll explains.

Brian O’Driscoll has said that all athletes, regardless of their success, at some stage experience a crisis of confidence, and that Conor McGregor will be no different.

“I think Aldo deserved an immediate rematch because of how the fight ended and because he was undefeated for 10 years, but (McGregor) wanted to move up and fight me”. I see myself dominating him completely. You can’t blame him for that, it just sucks that it’s at my expense and now I’m in limbo since I was supposed to get that next title shot. “He’s a slower version of [McGregor’s previous opponent] Jose Aldo, he’s a bum version of Aldo. I’m going to be in the gym to help my teammates and getting better and working on some southpaw fighters”.

“Cut out all the other stuff and I’d go through the whole roster in four months, ” McGregor said.

In dos Anjos’ eyes, the clash will finally be the one where fans will recognize his talent and value him as a fighter.

He also holds wins over former lightweight champion Benson Henderson and lightweight contender Nate Diaz. And then, pretty much, an ultimatum was put to me that; “I don’t think I could continue working if that journalist was chosen ahead of me”. Everybody was saying I was too hasty. “I will show him the worst side of the game”.

Yet even though he was knocked out by archrival Conor McGregor in 13 seconds at December 12’s UFC 194, Aldo was expected to be headed for a huge payday apart from his $400,000 base salary thanks to his perceived pay-per-view (PPV) cut from the massively awaited event, which is expected to have drawn well north of 1 million buys.

“I’d gotten a request from Paul to do a piece with him instead for his column and I said that I’d promised it to someone else and I couldn’t renege on that”.

“And that was it. I’m not a good ultimatum guy”. “I will be there March 5 and maybe I’ll have to parachute my ass into that Octagon, they can’t get me out of there”.