Former UFC welterweight and welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre knows a little about losing a fight that everyone expected you to win.
In 2007, the underdog Matt Serra knocked out GSP in what is still considered the biggest turning point in UFC history. So it’s safe to say that the Canadian fighter knows a little bit about what it takes to turn around a defeat like Conor McGregor’s at UFC 257 against Dustin Poirier and have a successful turnaround.
Georges exposed his thoughts on the fight and what McGregor needs to do from here in a new episode of Michael Bisping’s podcast.
“I thought Conor was going to win, but I was wrong,” said St-Pierre. “I was very surprised. Will he keep his composure under pressure? I think one of the greatest qualities of Conor is that he overcomes his opponents with pressure, with presence. All the information he gives to his opponent’s brain and the conversation and everything, many of his opponents give in under pressure, but Poirier kept an eye out, and it was real proof of how good he is. It was fantastic.”
Poirier mentioned after the victory that McGregor was not a mythical force entering the second fight as he was preparing for the first fight in 2014.
“I felt less of his presence, less of his aura,” said Poirier at the UFC 257 post-fight press conference. “I just saw another fighter tonight. I think that in the first fight, I was a kind of deer in the headlights, you could say. This time, I was fighting another man. Another man who bleeds like me. And I knew that. “
“Now it will be really interesting to see how Conor will recover from that,” said GSP. “I believe he can come back from that loss. He’s the type of fighter who feeds on confidence. That’s how it performs best. I think he needs to be reborn. He needs to change things in his training and in his life that he believes were the causes of his failure. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, as long as he believes. ”
“So, in my case, when I lost to Matt Serra, I trained myself to believe that I lost to Matt Serra because I underestimated him. Maybe I wasn’t scared enough, maybe I wasn’t trying too hard, that’s what I tried to force myself to believe. It may not be true, but the important thing is that he believes in it so that he can build his confidence out of it. “
McGregor already seemed busy analyzing the fight and what went wrong right after his defeat. He is already campaigning for an immediate rematch for the UFC. Did he find out what went wrong? Or is he being affected by the same kind of delusional denial he continues to exhibit in relation to the defeat to Khabib Nurmagomedov?