Chael Sonnen doesn’t see how a fourth Dustin Poirier and Conor McGregor fight would make sense right now.
Despite the blockbuster pay-per-view numbers that McGregor’s rivalry with Poirier has generated, Sonnen thinks Poirier as a comeback fight for McGregor (22-6 MMA, 10-4 UFC) would be too soon for the Irishman, who’s currently recovering from a broken leg which he suffered in a doctors stoppage TKO loss to Poirier in July.
Sonnen thinks Poirier has McGregor’s number.
“Fighting Dustin Poirier again, man that’s a tough sell,” Sonnen said on his YouTube channel. “You want to bring the wife back into it, you want to bring the backstories, you want to bring the injury – you’re going to move the needle for sure but you’re going to have to work. It’s a tough sell. Conor couldn’t beat Dustin when Conor was training his ass off. Conor got re-motivated, reinvigorated, retrained, and couldn’t beat Dustin. We don’t know what Conor was doing for preparation but we know he was doing it.
“Now we know he’s not. That’s what an injury represents. He can’t do anything for a period of time so for sure just using logic there is no opportunity that Conor got better. There’s no opportunity to believe he’s going to be sharper in this one than he was in the last one. Conor was doing rehab, but Dustin Poirier was training for a world title fight. Just basic logic tells us Dustin is going to smoke him. Do we even need to see that? Does Conor need to put himself in that position?”
McGregor defeated Poirier via TKO in the first round in their 2014 featherweight bout, but Poirier (28-6 MMA, 20-5 UFC) was able to one-up McGregor in their past two outings – a knockout win at UFC 257 and a TKO at UFC 264. But due to the unfortunate ending of their trilogy bout, “The Notorious” thinks they have unfinished business.
With Poirier scheduled to challenge lightweight champion Charles Oliveira at UFC 269 on Dec. 11, Sonnen thinks the logical thing for McGregor to do is to take another fight before trying to settle his score with “The Diamond.”
“Why can Conor not be reasonable?” Sonnen added. “Why can Conor not say, ‘This is all about Dustin Poirier, F you Dustin Poirier, nothing has been forgotten, he can do the whole Conor schtick and say I need one before you. I’m coming off an injury, I’m gonna get my feet wet over here then I’m gonna see you next.’ Why couldn’t he do that? That would make sense. That would be easy. Now you don’t need a spin job, now you don’t need a sell machine and now we would have something to look forward to.”
