Dustin Poirier vs. Conor McGregor II: Death Of A Southpaw
Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC
McGregor won the first time, and seven years later, Poirier proved to be the one who learned.
Poirier vs. McGregor 1 was a true crossroads fight for both men at the time, and both ending up top-contenders didn’t seem particularly likely; while Conor McGregor rode a wave of momentum from his debut — a wave that ended up drowning his opponent on the night — Poirier was already uncomfortably close to being a defined action-fighter. The nascent Louisianan was only five years into his career but already had 22 fights, had lost to the two biggest names he’d faced, and getting crushed in 106 seconds seemed to write his fate as the paradoxical fragile banger. Even the beginnings of their forays into 155 made the same point, as McGregor torched the great Eddie Alvarez while his counterpart was getting cut down by Michael Johnson. Dustin Poirier was quite painfully touched by greatness at UFC 178, but no reasonable man entertained the possibility of him touching greatness in return — nor should they have, until he did exactly that.
Poirier’s later success has been a matter of many things — widening into his frame since his featherweight days, and gaining more than his fair share of durability and power in the process — but the lion’s share of it was just hard graft; starting with the Miller fight where Poirier introduced his jab, “The Diamond” went from strength to strength as he ripped his opponents apart in wars of attrition. He fought hard and he fought often, and he had messier showings (such as the Hooker fight) but always against the best that the UFC had to offer him. In contrast to Poirier’s lightweight run, McGregor’s appearances were defined by a different sort of graft, the kind inherent in a promotion looking for profits; the megastar dropped off the map for years at a time, walking back into main-events and title-fights at a whim, and yet largely justifying that treatment with his performances anyway.
The obvious exception to both of those stories was Khabib Nurmagomedov, who spoiled the UFC’s hopes for a lucrative McGregor Era just as surely as he did Dustin Poirier’s grueling rise to title contention. That shared blemish aside, the favorite going into the rematch of Poirier vs. McGregor 2 never seemed in doubt to the public — everything that Poirier had done while warring in the trenches for years at a time, full-time, McGregor had surpassed with what seemed like absurd effortlessness and growing disinterest. What Poirier did at UFC 257, then, was a victory for the worker — the ones who are forced to critically view their own craft, and come out the other side better fighters than the ones who started out with all the tools. As Poirier noted before the fight, that’s what he represented in the face of the most natural talent in recent memory — the 9-to-5ers who needed to find a way against all odds — and find a way he did.
The Big Left Hand
While the cause of Poirier’s first loss to McGregor (seen later) was a concern, much of the educated public stood by the -300 price-tag for McGregor for a different reason. McGregor had easily found a way around the guard of Poirier in their first fight, but McGregor is a counterpuncher at heart, and Poirier’s habits seemed ill-equipped for that as well.
Poirier’s last loss on the feet was to Michael Johnson, a blisteringly quick combination-counterpuncher, and the issue was Poirier simply ceding his positioning in the pocket for no good reason; throwing himself off balance with a lead-uppercut left Poirier upright and squared, and Johnson summarily made him pay. To his credit, Poirier wasn’t as keen to leave himself on a platter moving forward, but he also didn’t clean his feet up completely — instead, Poirier just harnessed that messiness in a very specific and effective way. Poirier’s willingness and skill in walking with his punches, shifting through them and crowding with them, was a meaningful component of his fantastic victory over Max Holloway — as Holloway’s linear retreats were punished by Poirier’s ability to cover large swathes of distance — but the downside is with a fighter who isn’t necessarily retreating. Dan Hooker showed both the upsides and the downsides of Poirier’s approach; as the massive Hooker looked to exit, Poirier chased him down very effectively, but was caught between stances and bare when he couldn’t fully step through.
Poirier’s favorite combination in this fight was a response to Hooker’s backstepping jab — he’d throw away his left as he shifted into orthodox, crossing over Hooker’s lead hand. This worked very well, as the shift covered more distance than simply jabbing into range against someone so tall, but the issue came when Hooker stood his ground as Poirier was expecting him to drop back. Intercepted in the middle of his shift, Poirier essentially squares up in front of his opponent, giving up sound defensive options with his stance and compromising his offense without a base to properly shift weight.
Conor McGregor wasn’t the kind to try to get away from Poirier at all costs — on the contrary, McGregor’s ability to time his opponent’s entry is next-to-legendary, even from the opening seconds of the fight (as Jose Aldo found). The risk in shifting was McGregor angling back and interrupting the step with his straight left, and McGregor’s such a formidable puncher that even getting hit with his feet underneath him was a dangerous prospect for Poirier; providing the force for McGregor’s counter while giving up his stance was the worst-case scenario. Quite shrewdly, Poirier seemed to recognize this risk going into the fight, and went to work taking the Irishman’s signature punch away.
The overhand/double changeup is as old as time for wrestlers, it’s the same thing that led to Nurmagomedov knocking down McGregor in 2018, but Poirier made terrific use of it. Note how similar the early takedown entry for Poirier was to his usual shifting work — Poirier convinces McGregor to try to intercept him with the left, proactively ducks off his throwaway, and gets to the takedown. As odd as the mechanics of the double were, the setup was intelligent regardless — even if the takedown hadn’t worked, it would have contributed to Poirier’s overall aim, as the second example did.
Note the contrast between the hair-trigger on McGregor’s left in the first few examples and the later ones. Where McGregor was shooting the left as soon as Poirier left his stance earlier in round 1, he’s now realized that Poirier is shifting in on his hips — where standing his ground and squaring his hips to counter straight would give Poirier a cleaner entry. So McGregor’s waiting for a second more — dropping backwards from the potential takedown, and looking to counter when Poirier proves to be committed to a striking entry. Combined with Poirier largely working in his stance behind the jab/right hook more than shifting — more on that later — the way Poirier accounted for the risk in his wilder moments kept McGregor’s counterpunching a bit muted.
The meaningfulness of the takedown gambit from Poirier was almost completely separate from what he’d do on the ground — as seen with the first one, the answer was “nothing”, and McGregor quite easily won the clinch so that wasn’t a real damage-dealing aim for Poirier either. What the plan did, though, was convince McGregor to concede some space to Poirier — giving more free ground on his rushes than he’d otherwise be willing to give, to make sure the fight would remain in the open. Poirier didn’t win with a shift, but Poirier dulling the trigger of McGregor early gave him a bit more room to be reckless — he was still taking proactive defensive measures after his combinations, so that extra second was immensely valuable in making sure he wasn’t getting cracked for every step forward. It also gave McGregor a bit more trouble commanding the cage when he was forced to back up in this way — where normally his counterpunching would keep his opponent from rushing him to buy some space. With Poirier making counterpunching unexpectedly difficult in the early going, McGregor looked to work on the lead — which he’s quite good at, but Poirier had several aces up his sleeve.
On The Other Hand
Since their first fight, McGregor and Poirier developed in different ways as strikers — while both became elite, McGregor seemed to lean hard into the advantages of being a southpaw in an orthodox world, where Poirier went a more unique direction. McGregor’s length and his counterpunching skill made the open-stance game incredibly effective for him — as he proved time and time again with Eddie Alvarez, an opponent looking to leap through the naturally extended open-stance distance is where McGregor was most comfortable. McGregor’s boxing on the lead benefitted from the stance matchup as well — he’d throw the rear round kick through the open side to play off his straights, and his rear hand could generally shine without his opponent’s lead shoulder in the way. As such, McGregor’s lead hand served more as a tool than a weapon — something to draw his opponent’s attention, handfight and defend takedown attempts, and generally clear the path for the shot that he really wanted to land.
In contrast, Poirier’s game wasn’t the kind that southpaws use often — where pure straight-punching and the double attack border on southpaw cliché, there are precious few parallels for Poirier’s game. The most accurate is probably prime Robbie Lawler — in an inversion of southpaws often using distance as defense and largely relying on their rear hands, the legendary welterweight made his hay in the pocket with the help of an extraordinarily dexterous lead hand. While the natural handfight of the open-stance makes it a bit less intuitive, Lawler was terrific at using that to his advantage — getting behind his shoulders and moving his head on the inside, winning the handfight to find that fantastic right hook over and over. Poirier’s rear hand is perfectly functional, but his best win — the Max Holloway rematch — partly hinged on his lead hand’s variability and power, even if it looks a bit uglier against orthodox opponents than just sniping them off the rear side. Serving as both a tool and a weapon, Poirier’s right hand can draw attacks out and handfight just as well as it can punish entries with the hook and play it off the uppercut.
The Robbie Lawler comparison has an additional dimension that came into play with Poirier/McGregor 2 — while many southpaws look baffled or cautious without the open-stance, the most masterful moments of Lawler’s career came in his fights with another southpaw in Johny Hendricks. Conor McGregor looked far from helpless against the southpaw Poirier — in fact, he did a very good job considering the details of his game — but Poirier was secretly built for a sort of fight that McGregor had to adapt to.
This is less Poirier being defensively great (although he’s quite good, as seen later) and more a show of the difficulty a classical southpaw game can have against another southpaw; McGregor needs to do more work than usual to find his rear hand because Poirier’s lead shoulder provides a natural barrier to just firing it straight at him, where Poirier’s right hook attacks the “open” side in a southpaw-southpaw fight. Also note Poirier drawing counters from the very beginning, showing off his versatile lead hand — using the jab to pull out Conor’s 1-2 and hooking off it, looking to dissuade McGregor’s heavy pressure from the start.
To his credit, McGregor recognized this dynamic — Poirier 2 was one of McGregor’s more lead-hand-heavy performances, as he did a solid job using the jab to draw counters from Poirier and draw his guard. McGregor has always been fond of the lead uppercut to set up the rear hand — where the former would pop their head up to get them blasted by the left — and Poirier 2 saw a clever inversion of the tactic; several times, McGregor would convince Poirier to get behind his shoulder or draw up his guard with a throwaway left hand, and shock him with the lead hand up the center.
The closed stance also didn’t stop McGregor from finding his left hand altogether. Here, Poirier does a very nice job defensively — slipping outside McGregor’s up-jab and getting behind his shoulder on the straight — and McGregor responds with a clever little angle.
Poirier pulls away from the jab, as his lead shoulder is up to deal with the rear hand.
Note the small change in McGregor’s position here, though — it might be hard to see in isolation, but look at McGregor’s feet relative to the advertisements in 1 to 2. He’s taken a slight lateral step after engaging Poirier’s defenses, as Poirier’s leaning back and can’t reposition with him.
What this does is take him past the lead shoulder of Poirier; the straight is on the inside track with that step, and Poirier probably didn’t even notice the change until he got hit. This is the way in which McGregor always used his lead hand, to distract and draw out, and it worked against Poirier too.
Of course, the one place where Poirier improved beyond measure in the space between fights was comfort under fire; McGregor could get past his defenses, but it wasn’t easy through Poirier’s improved defense and a counterpunching threat that didn’t exist at the time of the first fight. As McGregor learned in trying to recreate the finish of the first fight, this hinged on Poirier’s right hook.
Not dissimilar to how it operated in the Holloway rematch, Poirier’s counter right hook really stifled McGregor’s ability to walk him down and swarm him; in the first Poirier finish, for instance, Poirier simply allowed McGregor to close distance behind his lead hand and work around the guard, where Poirier catch-and-pitching many of McGregor’s leads with the hook prevented McGregor from doing the same thing.
Somewhat oddly, the dominant narrative of Poirier/McGregor 2 has become the legkicking; partly due to McGregor himself saying that he was hurt badly by them, the fight has been contextualized as McGregor completely falling behind the current kicking metagame. Truthfully, the kicking game was important but fairly uninteresting; Poirier’s kicks suffer mechanically from his hip issues — due to which he’s had moments of needing the cage for balance to kick high — and yet he could often just fire them without a setup to score on McGregor from range. He did the same thing in the first fight, even — McGregor just took them cleanly and swarmed him anyway, because the changes to the fight came with Poirier’s improvement as a counterpuncher and defensive-fighter. McGregor’s alliance with SBG Ireland is still a quite curious one, and the fact that the other prominent products out of that camp tend to be grapplers (Gunnar Nelson, Makwan Amirkhani) substantiates the possibility that McGregor just isn’t training an important development — but the boxing wasn’t one-way traffic either, as Poirier’s improvements were evident. If anything, the most interesting part of Poirier’s kicking game at UFC 257 was the finish, where the kick simply set up the killshot.
McGregor committed to catching kicks at one point, but couldn’t turn that into any effective work; his best moment dealing with Poirier’s leg kick was stepping into the straight, catching Poirier clean — although Poirier did try to right-hook off the kick. The finish was something similar from Dustin, but with him playing the counterfighter — countering the straight of McGregor with the outside leg kick, with McGregor trying to keep the combination going while off-balance and getting right-hooked for it. The assumption from many was that a messy fight favored Poirier; as McGregor couldn’t keep the initiative due to Poirier’s lead hand, he started to concede messier and messier exchanges in trying to punish Poirier’s kicking, and he took the shot that functionally ended the fight.
Poirier’s finishes show a lot of the accuracy and shot selection that make him special in shorter exchanges — the way he went wide with his left hand after conditioning McGregor to expect the straight, how that lead-hand again appeared to punish McGregor’s defensive efforts and change the rhythm of the flurry (with uppercut-to-hooks and hook-to-jabs), and just the relentlessness of it all leaves Poirier one of the most instinctive finishers in MMA. In this sort of position, there aren’t many fighters that survive with Dustin Poirier.
Parting Thoughts
Regarding rematches such as Volkanovski vs. Holloway 2 or Whittaker vs. Romero 2, one thing that’s been briefly noted is that the loser is far more likely to acknowledge that something truly went wrong — which, in the absence of physical decline (or a Cody Garbrandt), often means a closer fight the second time around. Winners don’t have to get complacent, but they often will recognize that staying the course is the smartest thing to do — making them an accurate focus of adjustment for a loser who’s willing to attempt that adjustment. What Poirier’s career has seemingly represented is a version of that concept spread across an entire career arc — where Conor McGregor’s success kept him going down the classical southpaw path, Dustin Poirier’s failures pushed him onto one that’s better at dealing with the classic southpaw. Perhaps the best lesson wasn’t Conor McGregor, but Michael Johnson — who was never a consistent winner, but whose win over Poirier turned Poirier into an absolute monster, and the McGregor fight has shown that Poirier has truly learned from the issues that southpaws or counterpunchers like Johnson used to give him. That’s not to say Poirier is never going to be beaten the same way twice — Nurmagomedov is a massively likely exception to that — but he’s an undeniably self-aware fighter in a sport that’s truly lacking in that regard.
On Conor McGregor’s part, it’s not impossible that inactivity played a role in his loss — at the elite level, McGregor has no wins since 2016 — but there’s also no argument that McGregor would be able to play his usual game against 2021 Poirier. Poirier’s length and his absurd durability make sure of that, but so do his keen technical improvements and thoughtfulness about fighting. In a sense, that’s quite encouraging on McGregor’s chances against the rest of 155 — McGregor made a fight of a bout against an unquestionably elite fighter, 4 years after he’d last truly figured out an elite himself. McGregor has already opened as a favorite in a prospective third fight with Poirier, likely due to his success in that first round; however, if anything was learned from that round, it is that Poirier at least can survive the early portion where McGregor is most dangerous. Be it by defense or durability, Poirier isn’t going away easy — and having seen it, it’s somewhat difficult to see McGregor beating his own historical clock, or Poirier not growing stronger as the rounds go on. Poirier/McGregor 2 answered the question, and answered it conclusively.
Past McGregor, Poirier has a division full of challenges to address — Charles Oliveira on the grappler’s Poirier arc since his move to 155, former Bellator king Michael Chandler, and Justin Gaethje’s redux since Poirier’s last meeting with him — but there’s absolutely no question that Poirier is the top man at lightweight currently. With one of the strongest resumes in the history of the sport, Dustin Poirier is reaching rarefied air as a fighter — and unlike Conor McGregor, he really did show his work, coming out on top because of it. As he’d say, his status as the de facto (but unquestionably undisputed) champion was paid in full at UFC 257.