The best and worst from UFC 229: Khabib vs. McGregor

#1 Worst: The post-fight melee, obviously

Scenes of total chaos followed the main event

Even MMA fans who didn’t order UFC 229 have probably seen the clips of the post-fight melee between the various players involved in the Nurmagomedov and McGregor camps now – clips are all around on the internet although I won’t link them here as they’re being removed as quickly as they’re being added.

To summarise, Khabib submitted McGregor with a neck crank in the fourth round, and then leapt over the cage and into the crowd to attack McGregor’s jiu-jitsu coach Dillon Danis, who currently fights for Bellator.

While all of this was going on, two of Khabib’s cornermen – reportedly UFC fighters Islam Makhachev and Zubaira Tukhugov, who may lose their jobs over the incident – leapt into the cage and began to exchange punches with McGregor, who was trying to recover from the fight.

Watching the incident it did appear that McGregor swung back at the two attackers – he may have even thrown the first punch – but realistically Khabib’s crew were to blame for this mess as they shouldn’t have been in the cage in the first place.

Essentially, the whole thing left a black eye on what should’ve been a triumphal night for the UFC with literally millions of people watching.

But can we really condemn Khabib and his crew entirely, after April’s bus attack instigated by McGregor, as well as the amount of trash that the Irishman has talked on his country, culture and religion?

Perhaps not. Maybe this is a case of the bear – no pun intended – being poked with the stick and finally snapping back.

The lesson to be learned is maybe that fighters from Russia and in particular Dagestan take things a little more seriously than their Western counterparts.

McGregor and his boys weren’t messing with plastic gangsters like the Diaz brothers here. And so they arguably reaped what they’d sewn.

Still, the aftermath of a big UFC fight was no place for this to happen. It was reminiscent of 2010’s infamous StrikeForce ‘Nashville Brawl’, which also left a black eye on the sport; it was clearly the worst moment of UFC 229, and it may yet see Khabib stripped of his title. Sad times.