After a year-long build up, the much anticipated Jose Aldo vs. Conor McGregor featherweight title fight went down fast, lasting just over 10 seconds. McGregor caught Aldo flush on the jaw and faceplanted him in the first exchange. Don’t call it a fluke, either. The plan was always to feint, make Aldo react, and then catch him coming in and overextending himself. McGregor went so far as to reveal the plan leading up to the fight, and damn if he didn’t end up pulling it off exactly as he said he would.
That hasn’t stopped Aldo from continuing to spit trash at McGregor over social media. Immediately after Conor’s loss to Nate Diaz at UFC 196, Aldo tweeted, “You got nowhere to run now. Time to a rematch, pussy.”
An interesting thing to say for someone who turned down the opportunity to fight McGregor at UFC 196.
“I just think it’s – he had an opportunity to show up and he didn’t,” McGregor said at the post-event press conference when asked if he had seen Aldo’s tweet. “He could be sitting where Nate’s sitting. He was the first choice. He said ‘any time, any place, anywhere.’ And then, it wasn’t any time, any place, anywhere.”
“Now another man gets a victory over me, and he celebrates it? That’s the sign of a loser. That’s the sign of somebody – that’s the sign of a runner-up. That’s not the sign of a champion.”
It’s unclear whether the smack talk has Conor more or less enthused at the idea of rematching Jose, but he mentioned the Brazilian fighter when contemplating what his next fight might be.
“It’s kind of hard not to give Aldo another go,” he said. “He’s 10 years undefeated. But he pulls out a lot and he doesn’t show up a lot. Frankie at least gets in there and competes. So, I dunno. I’ll keep my ear to the ground and see who the fans want to see most.”
That may have encouraged Aldo to keep stirring the pot in order to get the fight he wants. During the taping of Brazilian TV show Extra Ordinarios, Aldo didn’t let up.
“Some fighters have a great punch, others don’t,” Aldo said. “His hands are actually made of soap. Of course that anyone goes down if you connect a blow in the chin. Even a child hitting in the chin, anyone goes down. He has hands of soap. He always hits and nobody ever feels it.”
“He quit, couldn’t take it anymore, wanted to run away. He’s a pussy. He went down and quit. He was slapped in the face. He looked like a child, getting slapped in the face.”
As McGregor has said in the past, people have been buried in the Nevada desert for less. Will this earn Aldo a rematch at UFC 200? Or will Conor decide it would punish Jose more to pass him up in favor of Frankie Edgar? Even after losing, it seems like everyone still wants a piece of McGregor.