Khabib: I attacked Dillon Danis because John Kavanagh is ‘too old’

Khabib Nurmagomedov went after Dillon Danis at UFC 229 because Conor McGregor’s other cornermen were “too old.”

“No, I didn’t hear him, you know,” Nurmagomedov assured in a video published by Submission Radio. “I didn’t hear him, it was too loud.”

“I jumped on him because other corner is too old; because Conor’s other corner, other coaches, too old, and that’s why I jumped on him,” said Nurmagomedov. “Because he’s almost like my age.”

After all, “If I jumped on [coach John] Kavanagh, I don’t think it’s too — cause Kavanagh can’t fight me. That’s why I jumped on [Danis].”

“I don’t like his whole team. I have choice what I’m gonna do, but all other old coaches were too old for me. They cannot fight with me,” he reiterated. “They’re almost like my father’s age.”

“I’m looking for punishment, first of all,” the Dagestan fighter said of the sanctioned fight with McGregor. “I wanted to make him tired. It’s very good when he tapped. It meant a lot for me [when he] tapped.”

“‘Please,’ he asked me, ‘Finish.’ This is much better than knockout,” Nurmagomedov insisted. “If I knocked him out in the second round, you go down, but people gonna talk about, ‘Oh, it’s luck,’ you know. But what about if you smash him all four rounds and he taps? It’s finished there. No more. I don’t think he ever wants to compete with me. Because he felt everything. He feel my mental, he felt my control, my striking and all that, and he tapped too.”

Nurmagomedov disagrees. “You know, he tried to make me relax. We already finished a three-round fight and then he beginning, tried to talk about this only business,” he explained. “It just showed his weakness.”

“In the first round for a couple of minutes, he’s not bad,” Nurmagomedov said of McGregor’s performance early in the fight. “But after that he’s slow and weak. He tried to talk with me about, ‘Oh, this is only business’. You know, this meant for me, ‘Please, calm down, don’t smash me.”