One of Conor McGregor's Ultimate Fighter contestants has declared the UFC legend missed "a lot" of training sessions while filming the show earlier this year.
Aaron McKenzie was defeated on week three of the show by Austin Hubbard in a vicious two-round fight which saw him end up in hospital as Team McGregor continued their losing streak. The American put up a solid fight on the feet early and was doing well in the opening round before Hubbard found his distance and almost stopped the fight with ground-and-pound and won the second.
And McKenzie has admitted he didn't see much of his head coach at morning training sessions, despite McGregor making a big effort to make it out for evening ones. Instead, much of the coaching was done by the likes of John Kavanagh, Owen Roddy, Phil Sutcliffe and Cian Cowley among others.
“The day after ‘Wonderboy’ was there, he was gone for three or four days for filming,” McKenzie told MMA Mania. “But other than that he was there every day pretty much. He was at night practices. He was there, ready to go. He was involved in practice, he was coaching, he was training with us. So he was there a lot more than the cameras are actually making him out to be.
“But I’ll tell you straight up: he wasn’t at a lot of morning practices. You can probably count the morning practices on one hand that he was at. But they were always set up to be good with the other coaches. There was never a moment where we’re like ‘What are we doing?’ The morning sessions, were always going to be run by somebody else and he would have mostly evening sessions.”
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McGregor found himself debating his effort, or lack thereof, with his opposite number Michael Chandler at the end of last night's episode. The pair got heated after the Irishman watched Lee Hammond lose to Kurt Holobaugh by submission and eventually the altercation turned physical when he pushed his rival in the face.
"I'm happy I got in there," McGregor told cameras after the incident, explaining that he was keen to show he does care about his team. "Because they were trying to filter this thing about the weigh-ins, right? Chandler's trying to pick at that like I wasn't being involved.
"I'm setting it up, it's me who set it up first of all it's not like I just left them to their own devices. It's actually quite the opposite, they were left amongst the best... I wanted to show my team that I'm with them, I'm going to stand for them and make a case for them and that's what we done."
