Max Holloway is playing with fire, and also showing his confidence in his ability, by his recent Twitter callout of Conor McGregor
In the evening of Wednesday, 28th October, Sean Sheehan (@SeanSheehanBA) made a friendly tweet asking MMA Twitter to send in their last MMA-related photo saved to their camera roll. You wouldn’t think it would spark something between two stars like Conor McGregor and Max Holloway, right?
Well, it did.
McGregor replied to this tweet with a picture of him fighting Holloway back in August of 2013 in McGregor’s sophomore UFC attempt, which then prompted one of the more surprising tweets to do with MMA in a while, when Holloway simply said “We got it, March.”
📞we got it. 🎰 March
— Max Holloway (@BlessedMMA) October 28, 2021
Could it Happen Again?
This fight has not been discussed by the UFC brass at all and the last time someone had mentioned it was when the Irishman said he would look forward to a rematch with ‘Blessed’ in the future, back in January of 2020. Since then McGregor has beaten “Cowboy” Cerrone and then lost to Dustin Poirier twice in the last 2 episodes of their trilogy, whilst Holloway has dropped a highly controversial title rematch with Alex Volkanovski and then absolutely demolished Calvin Kattar in one of the best performances in Featherweight history.
From a form and from a legacy standpoint, it’s surprising that Holloway is the one pursuing this fight and not McGregor. The only way that this makes sense for the Hawaiian is because he wants to avenge that loss that he received early in both of their careers as he believes he is a lot better than McGregor in the present day. It’s also a little strange because, well, Holloway is fighting in 2 weeks. Yes. 2 weeks.
He’s rounding out camp, getting ready to travel to Vegas and fight a killer in Yair Rodriguez, and he’s calling out someone as big as Conor McGregor for your next fight that would probably have to be a division up, 155, whilst getting ready for a 145 fight and if he wins, presumably the trilogy fight against Volkanovski. It was all sorts of strange timing and strange interests shown in this fight from Holloway. If his plan works and he beats Rodriguez, moves up to 155 to fight McGregor, beats him, goes down to 145 again and beats Volkanovski to regain his belt then this could be one of the best storylines this sport has ever seen. But this puts a massive amount of pressure on Holloway. He’s probably used to dealing with pressure though, he’s done it his whole career.
McGregor vs. Holloway 2?
The timing also seems a little off. Fighting Conor McGregor in March of 2022 would mean that Volkanovski would have to be shelved for an extended period of time (he last fought in September, and would be waiting until around July), or potentially fight another contender at 145, if the fight even happened.
The other thing with this date is that Conor might not even be in fight shape or fully recovered yet. People forget that the Irishman cleanly snapped his leg in the Poirier trilogy fight and has been recovering from surgery for only 3 months. He still needs a lot more time and is still a decent amount of time away from being able to use that leg in a fight and especially full contact train with it. He most likely won’t be ready for March, so even if this fight does happen it’d probably be in the second or third Quarter of 2022 which would stall and frustrate the Featherweight division in a lot of ways. You can check out MMASucka’s technical, in-depth breakdown of the McGregor/Poirier second fight where he snapped his leg here:
Blessed might have not been using his sense here, or he might’ve just been having a little bit of fun on social media, which he loves to do. However, this matchup is something to get excited about because if Holloway can get through his tough fights at 145lbs before McGregor has fully recovered and is ready to return, we could see a great rematch 9 years in the making.
What do you think about Holloway’s callout? Will this fight happen? Is this all just a stunt to increase hype for his upcoming fight? Let us know.
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