The Aldo KO
McGregor’s fight with Jose Aldo was a monumental moment of truth in his career. It not only earned him the chance to fight for a title, but against one of the pound-for-pound greats. Aldo was one of the UFC’s most technical strikers. Yet McGregor never seemed daunted. He even predicted a first-round finish.
“If he makes that walk with me, I feel I’ll KO him within one,” McGregor told BT Sports. “Every single movement I make will get an overreaction from him because he’s emotionally invested in it. The whole of Brazil is piling pressure on him. I see him overreacting, overextending and then being KO’d unconscious.”
‘Mystic Mac’ already had a reputation for predicting the outcome of his fights. But there were doubts this time around. Yet he left everyone stunned when he took just 13 seconds to KO Aldo. The former champ overcommitted on a right hand almost immediately, which McGregor slipped and then countered with a perfectly-timed left hook.
Only in the aftermath of the fight did people fully appreciate how precisely McGregor had foreseen the outcome.
“When we stared down I felt his right hand was twitching a little bit, which was a subtle tell for me,” McGregor had told Robin Black just days before the big fight. “He is ready to unload that right hand, and I feel that could be a downfall for him.”
