A “gimme fight.”
That’s how the newly crowned UFC lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez described a potential match-up with his featherweight counterpart Conor McGregor.
Just minutes after knocking out Rafael dos Anjos to become the 155lbs kingpin, Alvarez expressed his belief that a fight against the brash Irishman would represent a step-down in terms of the level of competition he’d faced in the UFC thus far.
For the first time, Alvarez came face to face with ‘The Notorious’ last week and staring into McGregor’s eyes did nothing to strike fear into the Philadelphia lightweight’s heart.
“Usually when I square off with a man, my heart rate goes up and I feel something. I’ve never felt so unthreatened by a human being as I did when I was up on stage with him,” Alvarez said on the MMA Hour.
“That’s the God’s honest truth. I’ve never felt so unthreatened by another man.”
Since signing from Bellator in 2014, Alvarez has competed against a who’s who of the lightweight division’s best in the form of Donald Cerrone, Gilbert Melendez, Anthony Pettis and Rafael dos Anjos.
And the Philadelphia 155lber continued to hammer home his opinion that McGregor is not as skilled as his recent opposition.
“I think every other one of them opponents that you’ve mentioned have a well-rounded skillset and even if the fight goes to another realm of MMA – where you’re going from standing up to the ground to Jiu-Jitsu – everybody’s tough in each one, they’re well-versed to the point that they can hang with some of the toughest guys in the world in any aspect of the sport and I don’t think he can,” Alvarez said.
“Not only that but the conditioning aspect is just not at a good level. The last Nate Diaz fight was a big eye-opener for me.”
As an East Coast fighter, Alvarez was expected to be one of the crowd favourites at the UFC 205 pre-sale press conference in New York but, in fact, he received a much less favourable reception than ‘The Notorious’.
But Alvarez is not bothered by the jeers levelled in his direction and actually slammed McGregor’s fans for an apparent lack of knowledge of the sport.
“I definitely didn’t expect that as far as the boos were concerned but it just reiterated to me what his fanbase is,” he said.
“His fanbase is him. It’s all perception and it seems like he’s got a lot of WWE fans, guys who don’t know much about fighting at all but they like him.
“You can have those fans, they’re not the fans I want anyway. I’ll get booed all day long because I don’t want fans who don’t know shit about MMA.
“I’d rather have a fan who knows the sport, who enjoys the sport and who can see the value.”
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