Conor McGregor is not shy in his expressions ahead of his third UFC 264 fight with Dustin Poirier.
“He’s a corpse,” McGregor told his website, The MacLife, on Wednesday when asked about Poirier, “a dead body, a blank face that’s going to get his ass whooped and taken out on a stretcher.”
McGregor (22-5) suffered a second-round knockout loss to Poirier in January at UFC 257. The lead-up to that fight was mostly an amicable one, but the Irishman has changed his tune for UFC 264, leaning back into the adversarial ways of his early UFC run.
UFC president Dana White recently told The MacLife that McGregor was “taking this fight a lot more serious” than January’s rematch and that the former two-division UFC champion now feels “like the old Conor McGregor.” McGregor echoed that sentiment on Wednesday, explaining that even his training camp looked vastly different for UFC 264 compared to the preparation he underwent for UFC 257.
“[We] just focused on mixed martial arts, first of all,” McGregor said. “It was an 85 percent camp for boxing [before UFC 257], for Manny Pacquiao, that’s how the fight came about. It was going to be a charity event, not even under the UFC banner. It was just because he was a southpaw and I felt a bit of pity for him and whatnot, so I’d help him out. And that’s it. It went the way it went and I got a setback in there, but setbacks are a beautiful thing. Defeat is the secret ingredient to success, I say, and it’s put me right where I need to be.”
McGregor added that he was already looking ahead of Poirier, who he previously defeated via first-round knockout at UFC 178 in 2014, and toward a potential year-end challenge for the UFC lightweight title, which is currently held by Charles Oliveira. McGregor targeted Allegiant Stadium, the 65,000-seat home of the Las Vegas Raiders, as his preferred landing spot for the matchup.
“I feel maybe Christmas time, December, I don’t know, we’ll talk afterward. But that world title will be contested in the Allegiant Stadium here in Las Vegas, I would imagine so,” McGregor said. “I like the look of it. It’s called the Death Star as well, and that’s what I’m feeling like right now — a Death Star.”
As for a prediction, McGregor was blunt about his intentions for Poirier.
“Every shot I have thrown in this camp is a kill shot, so that’s it. I’m going to kill this man,” McGregor said.
“Just a slaughter and a play with a scared little boy. He’s fighting scared like he always does, like they always do against me, so now I’m going to play with the little boy, play with me food, and then just devour it.”
