JRE MMA Show #44 with John Kavanagh & George Lockhart

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Here we go, four, three, two.

Boom, George Lockhart, John Kavanagh. How are you, folks?

John Kavanagh (0:10)

Hello, sir.

George Lockhart (0:11)

Doing great.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Good to see you.

John Kavanagh (0:12)

Good to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

So, Saturday night, what are your thoughts? Now that we're sitting here, it's Monday morning, the Khabib McGregor fight went down Saturday night.

John Kavanagh (0:26)

Obviously, hugely disappointed that we didn't get the result on the night.

I still enjoyed it. I thought it was a great fight. I'm looking forward to watching it back many times. All the corners fights, I always pull a load of lessons away that I can pass on to the next generation of guys. But, yeah, overall, I really enjoyed the fight, and I'm devastated that we didn't get the win.

Joe Rogan (0:46)

How much time did you have to prepare for this fight?

John Kavanagh (0:49)

I mean, he's always in the gym. He's always knocking about, but I guess it was official about 10 weeks out.

But even since the Eddie fight, I kind of knew, or at least I taught, his next MMA fight would be Habib. It just kind of made sense. If it wasn't going to be the Diaz, but then as time went on, that seemed less and less likely, and Habib obviously was doing great, kept on winning, so there was a path that was going to collide.

Joe Rogan (1:16)

Was there anything that was surprising in the fight?

John Kavanagh (1:21)

The right hand in the second round was a cracker. It was beautiful overhand right. I mean, it's a staple of wrestlers overhand right and close, but he doesn't generally do that. He's more java than close, but that was a great shot.

The style of takedowns, everything was kind of what we expected, and we spent a lot of time in preparing for that.

Yeah, just I, you know, kind of expected round one for sure going to get a takedown. So the goal of round one was to get out of it, but still having energy. We didn't want to put a huge amount of effort into trying to get back up in round one, which seemed to happen many times in his other opponents. And he kind of got back to the stool, you know, really tired. So round one, make them pay, you know, do our best on the way in, fight as hard as we can. But if we do end up down, which was against the fence, figured it would be there, tried to stay seated up.

If we end up in our back, just try to play guard until the bell, except it will be a 10-9 round. For round two, again, same plan, do as much damage as we can. But if we end up on our back, don't put a huge amount of effort in trying to get up, he's an absolute master, re-grounding people. That turned out to be a 10-8 round, you know, he got some good shots there, and obviously he landed the great right hand. So that was a bit more than we hoped for. Round 3, things started kind of turning a little bit in our favor, and we did a lot better at keeping it in the middle, defending the takedowns.

Joe Rogan (2:54)

So the plan was to slow him down a little, and watch him slow down a little bit in the third, fourth and fifth?

John Kavanagh (2:58)

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So I think at the beginning, the consensus was Connor knocks him out in the first, or Habib takes over from two on. Like first to win the third round was probably a bit of a surprise to people.

But you know, the aliquin to fight, if you look at that, from round three on, he wasn't able to hit any takedowns.

So hoped that would be how it would go in round three. We could defend the takedowns a lot easier and start landing air shots. And that did happen for round three. Not as well as we planned, not as well as we hoped. And then round four, we hit another great takedown, made a mistake giving up the overhook, exposed our back, and that was all she wrote.

Joe Rogan (3:40)

Yeah, he has such a unique ability to tie both legs up with his legs.

John Kavanagh (3:45)

Yeah.

In round one, I thought Conor did well. We had practiced for that, to keep our legs bent. You see guys straighten their legs and then conor did do that a couple of times, but he was able to continuously get a leg free. So not until the last 30 seconds or so of round one, he didn't really tie them up and get them flat in his back. For the majority of that, he was against the fence, used his hands to keep up right, tried to learn little shots, yeah.