Conor McGregor's striking coach, Owen Roddy was on the MMA Hour this week. And he gave a strong indication of which fight he would like to see McGregor embark upon next.
The majority of the discussion with Ariel Helwani did naturally revolve around the recent Floyd Mayweather fight.
Roddy admitted he has watched portions of the fight pretty much every day since August 26th. He was also very honest in assessing his own mistakes as a coach on the night.
Eh, a lot. I've watched rounds of it, the fight in full. Y'know, been watching it still almost every day since... A video came out today with corner audio and stuff there, I think it was yesterday or today. I only managed to catch it this morning. I watched that and yeah, still just analysing it, seeing if there's anything I could have done better.
He was also upfront in admitting that Mayweather's strategy did catch them by surprise as they felt going in that he would stick to his traditional cautious tactics.
When Mayweather switched it up and became like, he kind of walked Conor down. He kept the hands high, elbows in and just kept walking forward and letting Conor throw the shots on the arms.
When we saw that, we hadn't prepared for that. Like, we tried to switch it up from around six or seven, we were telling Conor, "keep popping shots, don't throw more combinations. Keep it like single shots, enter into the clinch and try and push him backwards."
But that should have been done. I should have been aware of a game plan like that from Mayweather and that should probably have been done in camp. It's hard to change things when you're in mid-fight, yeah so I'm a bit disappointed in myself.
I didn't predict that... I honestly thought he was going to pop shots, sit back, work the shoulder roll, work the philly shell and he did play that game for the first couple of rounds.
Conor was having success with all that and [Floyd] changed it up and unfortunately I didn't have the stuff in place for that walking him down strategy.
When the question of what he would like to see McGregor do next was put to him, Roddy clearly had one fight in mind that he would like to witness above all others.
I would probably like to see maybe Diaz III but obviously you've got Ferguson and Lee fighting for the interim belt. So, obviously if he's to fight MMA again, it would probably have to be against the winner of that.
The reason I say, just in my opinion, say Diaz is because those fights are so exciting. The build-up is so exciting, the back-and-forth, there's nothing like it. It's just a mad scene.
The two fights against Diaz were, y'know, probably the most exciting camps that I've been part of, and to do that again would be unbelievable. I'd honestly say that the fans would like that over everything else. But I've said to you before Ariel, I don't know what's next. I know it'll be crazy anyway.
The stars may be aligning for Diaz-McGregor III to be the next move as Nate Diaz just so happened to put up an Instagram post about McGregor this week too.
In it, he was less than enthused about the Crumlin man's notion of every fight being a case of either winning or learning.
While nothing is certain at the moment, reading the tea leaves would suggest that McGregor's camp still want a third face-off with Diaz and that he himself may well be getting into promotional mode with this Instagram post to generate buzz amongst fans and media.
