James Gallagher was not happy with the conditions leading up to his ACA debut last Thursday.
Gallagher (13-3) was scheduled to face ex-UFC fighter Ali AlQaisi (16-9) at ACA 194 in Dubai, but AlQaisi himself entered the cage to announce that the fight was off because Gallagher wasn’t happy with the warm-up area.
The former Bellator fighter confirmed that was the case. He claimed that he was very patient before his team made the call that it’s best for him not to fight.
“I get into the venue and go up to this room where there’s no mats, no nothing, and all the blue corner are in the room,” Gallagher said on the “Energized Show.” “So, you couldn’t swing a cat in it. Then I text the head (of ACA) and said, ‘Listen, I need mats.’ They then tell me that my fight has now moved from 5pm to 9pm that night. I’m like, ‘All right, sweet, it is what it is. I’m here to fight, it’s all good.’ They go, ‘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 to have a nap, they’re going, ‘The fights have now 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. I make the way over, go into the change rooms, still no mats in there with f*cking 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. So, we 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?’ I wasn’t looking to have flowers and chocolate there kind of thing. 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.”
Gallagher explained what finally tipped off his team to make the decision to back out.
“So as that’s happening, one of the main guys come up and shouts in my teammate’s face, ‘What’s the problem? I’m this close!’ Like, insinuating that he was going to fight with one of my teammates,” Gallagher added. “So after that, the team just decided to message my coach back home and they were like, ‘Listen, James, you’re not fighting. This is not happening. They’ve f*cked you around all day, f*cked you around all day yesterday, and it just it cannot happen like this.’ You’re a professional fighter, 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.”
