– Paul Dollery reports from New York
ACCORDING TO CONOR McGregor, Frankie Edgar would have been challenging him for the UFC featherweight title this weekend if he hadn’t slipped up in his most recent outing.
Back in July at UFC 200, Edgar’s bid for a sixth consecutive win and the interim 145lbs belt failed when he was comprehensively defeated over five rounds by Jose Aldo. It was a major setback for Edgar, who had been aggressively pursuing a shot at McGregor since his first-round knockout of Chad Mendes last December.
A title bout between McGregor — MMA’s biggest star — and Edgar — one of the UFC’s most successful New Yorkers — would have been the perfect main event for UFC 205, the organisation’s first ever event in the Big Apple, this Saturday night at Madison Square Garden.
That possibility ended, along with Edgar’s win streak, in the summer, with McGregor claiming recently that he probably would have been facing Edgar this weekend but he “just wasn’t good enough” when he took on Aldo.
Instead, McGregor will challenge defending lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez in Saturday night’s main event, while Edgar will look to kickstart another campaign for a title shot with a fight against Jeremy Stephens on the preliminary card.
Edgar spent the months prior to his second defeat to Aldo claiming that McGregor was deliberately avoiding him. Speaking at yesterday’s UFC 205 media day here in New York, the 35-year-old former lightweight champion reiterated that view.
“We’ve had opportunities to fight in the past many times, but it just seems to not happen,” he said when asked about McGregor. “Now he wants to say that I blew my chance. I think if I won that fight in July, we still wouldn’t be fighting here. He just wants to talk because he knows it can’t happen.”
Edgar, who’s backing his team-mate Alvarez to “put Conor away” on Saturday night, admitted his frustration at the fact that McGregor has been allowed to keep his featherweight title despite having not defended it yet. The Dubliner’s clash with Alvarez will be his third consecutive fight outside the 145lbs division since he won the belt from Jose Aldo in December of last year.
“I think he’s going to have to vacate that 145lbs title if he doesn’t defend it next,” Edgar said. “Has that been frustrating? Yeah, but it’s not something that’s in my control so I can’t focus on that too much, especially when I had an opportunity to do something about it but I didn’t take it.
“But as I said, even if I had, I don’t think he would have come back down to defend the title. It’s easy for him to talk about it after the fact. But we’ll see what happens after Eddie takes care of him. I’m just concentrating on getting my hand raised on Saturday night.”
