When Jose Aldo steps inside the Octagon to face Conor McGregor on Saturday night, he’ll have to destroy a myth, and really, it should be the other way around.
Only the Notorious could enter into a bout against a fighter who has never been beaten at featherweight as the betting favourite.
His acerbic-tongued rhetoric and ballsy predictions have seen his star power grow exponentially. “People say I’m all talk, but I back it up”, he proclaims and it’s hard to argue against it.
Knocking out Diego Brandao, Dustin Poirier, Dennis Siver and Mendes as he predicted, along with McGregor’s extraordinary ability to get under a fighter’s skin, not only makes the hype train gather momentum, but it adds to that atmosphere of intimidation he has been cultivating since he first signed for the promotion.
There is no doubt over who will have the greater support in the MGM Grand Garden Arena. Aldo’s been around the block and fighting Mark Hominick in the lion’s den at UFC 129 would have provided him some preparation for the impassioned crowd that will be baying for his decapitation via McGregor’s patented Celtic cross.
However, there’s nothing quite like fighting McGregor. He often says that he can see it in his opponent’s eyes after they step inside the cage when they’ve been broken.
All the increased media attention, the endless critiques of Aldo being over the hill, the promise of knocking him unconscious and that fear of suffering his first loss in years all has to be weighing down on Aldo like a 10-tonne hammer. Whereas McGregor only seems to thrive under the searing gaze of the magnifying glass.
That’s not even mentioning the pressure that comes with being a long-standing champion, which eventually becomes insurmountable. Anderson Silva admitted feeling relieved when Chris Weidman usurped his middleweight throne, and GSP has revealed he wants nothing to do with the welterweight title if and when he returns.
Aldo also appears to be edging closer to the end of his career, with rumours of his retirement even emerging from his own camp. McGregor is correct when he says “this game breaks you down”, and nearly seven years at the top appears to have done a number on “Scarface”.
Aldo has comprehensively defeated everyone the UFC has thrown at him and hasn’t really looked in danger of losing his belt, apart from a couple of brief moments against Chad Mendes and Frankie Edgar, but they subsided quickly once the champion regained the ascendancy.
He has only fought the number-one contender in the UFC who, at that particularly moment in time, is considered the biggest threat to the champion’s title. While McGregor hasn’t had the same standard of competition over such a long period as Aldo, he has knocked out Chad Mendes, who was the number one-ranked featherweight at the time.
A lot of people like to bring up the fact that Money took that fight on short notice, but the same can be said of McGregor. The Notorious had been preparing for a completely different fighter in Jose Aldo and yet, when the time came, he fulfilled his own prophecy by brutally knocking him out inside two rounds.
Without going into too much detail about their actual styles, which we deal with in detail in the accompanying video, I feel McGregor’s complex striking style will trump Aldo’s advanced fundamentals. He has this ability to bamboozle opponents with flashy techniques, punish them with body shots and finish them with that trusty left straight.
All the movement training he’s been doing will result in a more elusive McGregor, which I predict will make him harder to take down, and more importantly, keep down on the canvas.
McGregor’s stance means he’ll probably get cracked, but the Dubliner’s iron chin withstood the most ferocious of haymakers from Mendes, who hits harder than the champion.
Aldo will eat that cross from McGregor, and more often than not, when he finds home with that weapon, they fall.
Read the case for Jose Aldo here.
