Conor McGregor teammate James Gallagher once seemed like he’d be the next big fighter to come out of Ireland, but numerous fight cancellations over the past five years (plus this incident) have taken the shine off his star. So when it was announced that the Bellator and PFL veteran’s fight at Absolute Championship Akhmat 194 in Dubai had been called off at the last minute, it wasn’t too surprising. But the circumstances surrounding the situation were certainly unique.

During the event, his opponent Ali AlQaisi came into the cage and announced on the house mic that Gallagher had refused to fight him because he ‘did not like the warm up area.’ That certainly painted “The Strabanimal” out to be a diva, but Gallagher says it was just the culmination of a day of difficulty dealing with ACA.

“This room, there’s no mats, no nothing, and all the blue corner [fighters] are in the room,” he explained on the Energized Show. “So you couldn’t swing a cat in it. I text the head [of ACA], ‘Listen. I need mats.’”

“They then tell me that my fight has now moved from 5PM to 9PM that night,” Gallagher said. “‘Go back to the hotel, get some food, rest up, and then come back two hours before your fight to get warmed up.’ I’m like, ‘Sweet. Well, I need mats in the room to warm up in, and I need an area where I can actually move around in.’ And they’re like, ‘It’ll be sorted.’”

“So I go back to the hotel which is five minutes away, sit down, have food with my team, go to have a nap in the room. As I lay down, they’re going, ‘The fights have moved faster. You have to get back here now within ten minutes to get your hands wrapped.’ So I’m sitting there, full belly, after they told me that I wouldn’t be on for another four or five hours”.

“Make the way over, go into the change rooms,” he continued. “Still no mats in there with f–king 50 people in this little room where you couldn’t move around with nothing. Everybody’s wrapping hands. There’s chairs around. All this kind of thing. Wrap the hands and text them going, ‘Listen, is there a place here for mats? Or even just a spot where I can move around in.’”

ACA then moved Gallagher to a small tile floor boiler room littered with bricks.

“I wasn’t looking to have flowers and chocolate there kind of thing,” Gallagher said. “Do you know what I mean? I was just looking for somewhere suitable to get stretched, to get mobilized, to get warmed up, and get ready to fight.”

“So as that’s happening, one of the main guys come up and shouts at my team in his face, ‘What’s the problem? I’m this close!’ Like, insinuating that he was gonna fight with one of my teammates. So after that, the team just decided to message my coach back home and they were like, ‘Listen, James, you’re not fighting … They’ve f—ked you around all day, —ked you around all day yesterday, and it just it cannot happen like this.’”

Gallagher summed up his corner’s position.

“‘You’ve been around the block, and you’re not coming over here to get caught cold and to go out there to fight one of their boys who has a room to warm up in.’”

Despite the apparent aggression levied at Gallagher’s team, James insists this was just a miscommunication and hopes to work with ACA again.

“I did meet with the the president and the vice president of ACA, who are very respectful people who understood what I was saying,” he said. “So they apologized for it, and I also apologize to them for not fighting. We were at a mutual understanding of why it was. They reassured me that this … was just one of those things that happens, and we hope that we can rebook the fight in Russia, December 5.”

The 13-3 Gallagher is 1-2 over his last three fights, with three fight cancellations mixed in.