UFC legend Georges St-Pierre has assured Paddy Pimblett that every top fighter has bad nights at the office after he struggled to a controversial win in his last outing against Jared Gordon.
The former middleweight and welterweight champion appeared on the first episode of Pimblett's 'Chattin' Pony Podcast' recorded since the Gordon fight this week where the pair discussed the event. After having previously insisted that he did enough to win the bout, the Liverpool fighter was a more contrite figure, admitting that it was a poor performance.
And during the episode, the pair discussed what St-Pierre would advise given the situation, having taken some bad losses in his own career. He infamously was knocked by Matt Serra in one title fight before winning a rematch, but perhaps more notably for Pimblett, had an infamous decision win over Johnny Hendricks, where many fans and even promoter Dana White felt he lost.
"All the great fighters had fights where some people would say they lost," St-Pierre told the Brit, particularly drawing on the Hendricks victory. "Some people thought Hendricks beat me, Jon Jones has them, even Khabib [Nurmagomedov] against Gleison Tibau, every single guy.
"Everybody, even the best fighter, everybody has fights they were not so proud of, it happens to everybody and every day is different. Paddy, some days you wake up and things just don't go your way and we forget sometimes that fighting is the same thing. It's not always the best fighter that wins the fight it's the fighter that fights the best on the night.
"Maybe that night it was just not your night, things didn't go your way. Sometimes it's hard to find out why, but what I suggest to you, what I did in my case when I had performances that I was not too proud of, I took a note of all the things that I did before the fight and how I got ready for that fight and I try to make an assessment of what should I have done differently.
"I try not to repeat the same mistakes and sometimes it's hard to do! Sometimes it's just that in training one day I'm one second too slow and you don't really know why. Maybe you had a bad night's sleep, maybe you're fighting off a virus or something is troubling your mind emotionally. There are a lot of things that can influence your performance."
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Pimblett had been dealing with a controversial fight week in the lead-up to the bout, with fans mocking him over his handling of a feud with MMA journalist Ariel Helwani. He responded to the reporter's digs over being asked for payment to do an interview angrily, and was entering the cage a much less popular fighter with fans than his previous UFC outings.
He has claimed that the issue didn't affect him, and continued the build-up to his first pay-per-view bout as normal. But he drew further ire from fans post-fight when he refused to admit that the bout had even been close, let alone entertaining the notion that he may have lost.
"You just have to make an assessment to try and find out what it is and not repeat that again," St-Pierre continued. "The importance is that it's about you, what do you think. If you think you did well and won the fight, it doesn't matter what the other people think. You cannot please everybody.
"There's always hater, always people who will do anything they can to try and put you down. You cannot let that get into your head. One thing that you can do, if you feel like you were not happy with your performance and you want to do it again, call out the guy and say 'let's run it back again, no problem'. Maybe it was just a bad night for you and the other guy shined."
