Nate Diaz has responded to Dustin Poirier’s suggestion that he would come out of retirement to fight him, and his answer was not an invitation.
Speaking on The Ariel Helwani Show, Diaz addressed Poirier’s stated willingness to return for a matchup and delivered a blunt assessment of the retired fighter’s credibility as a potential opponent.
“I am interested if he f***ing gets in there and starts fighting people. I don’t fight retired fighters. He jumped ship a little early, so it’s not someone that I’m that interested in. Get back in the game and start squabbling with people. Where the hell did you go? ‘I’ll come back for you now.’ No, don’t come back on account of me. Get some sleep. Get you some sleep.”
Diaz then described the manner of Poirier’s retirement as the core of his problem with the situation.
“He got emotional when he fought somebody, and he’s like, ‘I’m retired. Oh, this was so great.’ A whole fing little lady moment where he needed to talk about his feelings and how he was all done with all this. And then he went, ‘Oh, what the fk did I do?’ Yeah, you were being a btch in your post-fight interview, and you set your gloves down and you shed a tear, and then two weeks later he’s like, ‘I want to fight Nate, I’ll come back for Nate.’ Like, you didn’t even leave, stupid. You f**ing pssed out. Don’t involve me in that sht. Get back in the game and start squabbling.”
Poirier retired following his loss to Max Holloway in Louisiana last year and had previously said on the Deep Waters podcast that a Diaz fight was one he would genuinely come back for given the unfinished business between them. Diaz and Poirier were booked to fight at UFC 230 in November 2018 before Poirier’s hip injury forced the cancellation.
Diaz faces Mike Perry in the co-main event of MVP MMA 1 at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood on Saturday, streaming live on Netflix.