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McGregor blasts MayMac referee: 'I knew I wasn't going to get a fair shake'

Joe Camporeale / USA TODAY Sports

The money fight of the year may be long over, but something still isn't sitting right with Conor McGregor.

The current UFC lightweight champion believes he faced some unfair adversity in the form of referee Robert Byrd during his fight with Floyd Mayweather, according to MMAFighting's Peter Carroll.

McGregor said Byrd had a "vendetta" against him, and suggested the referee's marriage to Adalaide Byrd - a boxing judge whose scoring of the fight between Gennady Golovkin and Saul "Canelo" Alvarez caused controversy - makes his conduct more suspicious.

"Adalaide Byrd's husband Robert Byrd, that's all I'll say on that," McGregor replied Friday when Caroline Pearce asked him how he felt about the 10th-round stoppage in the Mayweather fight. "That's her husband."

McGregor alleges that he received unequal treatment from the official during the pre-fight rules meeting as well as during tie-ups throughout the match.

"When we came face to face and we were doing the rules thing, he was only staring at me. I'm looking at him staring at me and I could see in my peripheral vision that he was looking at me and not looking at Floyd," McGregor said.

"I was going to say, 'He's fighting as well, mate. Give him the fucking rules.' I don't know, what was going on there?

"Every time we tied he literally wrestled me off him. It is what it is, I knew I wasn't going to get a fair shake out there."

After discussing Robert's in-ring decisions, McGregor circled back to the referee's personal connections.

"The referee was a weird one now the more I look back on it. Especially after Adalaide Byrd had that thing with the Canelo and GGG fight, that was her," McGregor said.

McGregor added, "Why did he not give (Mayweather) instruction? Why was he staring at me? He had a vendetta against me straight off the bat. Early exchanges in the tie-up, instead of just separating, he would reach around and pull me away.

"That takes energy away from me. I started getting - not paranoid - but I just started analyzing the whole thing a bit deeper. I felt like I got the short end of the stick here."

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