Dustin Poirier Doesn’t Think Eddie Alvarez Wants To Fight Him Again
Lightweight contenders Eddie Alavrez and Dustin Poirier met in an entertaining contest last May at UFC 211, but the fight ended in a no-contest after Alvarez landed illegal knees. Due to the controversial ending, many expected the UFC to book a rematch between the two, but that ultimately didn’t happen.
“The Diamond” went on to fight and beat former champion Anthony Pettis last month, and Alvarez coached against Justin Gaethje on the most recent season of The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) before finishing Gaethje in the third round of their UFC 218 bout this past weekend.
With both men back to their winning ways, Poirier is gunning for a rematch. In fact, he feels as if it ‘should’ve happened’ already:
“I felt that should’ve happened before he got that TUF gig. I was winning the fight, some foul stuff happened and we should’ve run it back,” Poirier said on a recent edition of The MMA Hour. “He shouldn’t have been rewarded with a TV show and another big fight. But, this isn’t the fair business, this is the fight business, so you keep rolling.”
And in the end, however, Poirier doesn’t actually feel as if Alvarez wants to fight him:
“I don’t think the guy wants to fight me. He can say what he wants to say, his coaches can say that they wanted the fight. Originally we both agreed, or supposedly I heard that he agreed to fight me in October in Vegas, and that’s what I was kind of started to prepare for,” Poirier said. “I was training in Florida for that, then it got moved to five weeks later against Pettis.”
Despite Poirier’s thoughts, it would certainly be an intriguing rematch. The first fight was exciting, and the two now have an intriguing back story. In fact, Alvarez recently labeled “The Diamond” as a ‘quitter’, something Poirier didn’t take lightly too:
“I’m not a quitter man. Look at my history. If he has to tell himself that to feel good about the 10 minutes he got his ass whooped, whatever. The crazy thing is, I grew up looking up to Eddie. He was a big name fighting out of Japan and HDNet used to do specials on him and I was a young fighter then and I really liked the guy,” Poirier said. “Still, now I respect him as a fighter, he’s a strong fighter and has a lot of heart. But as a person, he’s a bitch, man. He’s talking shit when I stood up for him in the heat of the moment. Maybe in the heat of the moment it was an accident, but now that I’ve gone back and watched the fight as a fan like he said, and I think it was on purpose. It was veteran move, he knew he was going out of that fight and he saw a chance to land a strike on a guy and did it. He knew exactly what he was doing, so he quit,” he added. “Fuck Eddie, fight me five rounds and let’s see who quits.”
Is this the fight you’d like to see next?
