McGregor to fight Diaz at UFC 196 after Dos Anjos gets hurt

UFC 196 has a new main event, as UFC Featherweight champion Conor McGregor will step up two weight classes to fight Nate Diaz in a non-title fight.

Last-minute switches have become commonplace for “The Notorious” during his UFC career. They’ve been telling me for years, we don’t want you to fight at 55, we don’t want you to fight at 155…but oh, you want to fight Conor McGregor on 10 days notice at 155?

According to UFC president Dana White, Diaz wasn’t the first choice for this fight, as Frankie Edgar and Jose Aldo were on the shortlist.

McGregor has boasted of his intention to win belts in multiple weight classes, and the UFC could be entertaining the possibility of matching McGregor against welterweight champion Robbie Lawler at its landmark UFC 200 show on July 9 in Las Vegas’ new T-Mobile Arena. Diaz replaces lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos, who suffered a broken foot during training.

Diaz and his older brother, Nick, are rivaled only by McGregor himself as mixed martial arts’ most eloquent trash-talkers, and the UFC 196 fighters are already off to an entertaining start. McGregor had solid plans to seek out something no other fighter has ever done before by becoming the first simultaneous multi-division belt holder, but now he must wait even longer for that dream to become a reality. He’s also a pretty damn good fighter to boot, as evidenced by his 13 career UFC victories. “I’m sitting here, I’m the one who’s been trying to fight this guy for months now”, Edgar told MMAFighting.com.

“I have a feeling that if I had said “yes, ‘ if Ali had texted back ‘yes, ‘ that fight still would have went to Nate Diaz”.

Diaz has a 28W-10L record in MMA and last entered in the cage in December past year, winning a unanimous decision over Michael Johnson at UFC on Fox 17. But McGregor obviously remains a huge draw. “The previous fight before that he came in sloppy and out of shape”.

This…is an incredible, insane fight to put it simply, as well as the best possible scenario fans could have hoped for following the removal of Dos Anjos from the card. I seem to recall them insisting quite recently that they were willing to fight Conor “any time and any place”.