Michael Chandler insists his much-anticipated clash with Conor McGregor is still going ahead.
Fans raised concerns that the UFC 303 main event was off after the launch press conference at Dublin’s 3Arena got postponed on Monday, hours before it was set to take place.
McGregor vs Chandler is still on and will go ahead on June 29Credit: Getty
Chandler and McGregor remained silent on the fate of their fight in the days that followed as rumours began to circulate online.
But Chandler has now clarified the situation.
“Yeah, the fight’s happening,” he told the Pivot Podcast. “Obviously, where we are there’s a lot of speculation, but yeah, the fight is on, June 29, it’s happening.”
McGregor and Chandler are set to meet on June 29 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Notorious has been out of action for three years since breaking his leg against Dustin Poirier at UFC 264 in July 2021.
Meanwhile, Chandler’s last fight – also against Poirier – took place in November 2022.
The 38-year-old has been patiently waiting for his date with McGregor since the pair squared off as coaches on The Ultimate Fighter 31 last year.
They were expected to duke it out before the end of 2023 but McGregor delayed his return to the UFC’s anti-doping program, which led to the fight being pushed back further and further.
Chandler has been waiting to fight McGregor for over a year nowCredit: The Pivot Podcast
When Chandler received the call that the press conference had been postponed until further notice it must have felt like a state of de ja vu.
“So I was actually up late that night because the fights were on the East Coast,” Chandler explained.
“I didn’t get into bed until 12.30 or 1 because I wanted to watch Islam Makhachev vs Dustin Poirier so I watched that fight.
“So I had probably fallen asleep for maybe 45 minutes or an hour and I woke up to my phone buzzing and it was Hunter Campbell.
“Everybody knows that Dana White is the face but Hunter is the guy behind the guy, he handles a lot of stuff behind the scenes for the UFC.
“He called me and let me know ‘Hey, it’s looking like this thing isn’t going to happen’.
“Then I laid there and thought about it for quite a while and the next morning we got on a call and he said ‘It’s not happening’.
“Obviously a cancelled presser, not that big of a deal,” he noted. “It happens.
McGregor has been out of action since July 2021Credit: Getty
“But it’s the layers in which ‘Okay if the presser is cancelled is there something else going on?’
“Then obviously immediately speculation starts going all over the place in 2024 with social media and all that stuff.
“I just kept resting on the fact that I can only control what I can control.
“I have been doing that now for a year and a half with this whole fight if you’ve been following it with all the different dates that have gone on and were supposed to happen but didn’t.
“Now here we are fighting in June of 2024, and it’s a case of ‘if you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans’, right?
“This isn’t about me, I ain’t in control so we’re just going to roll with it.”