Former UFC two-weight champion Conor McGregor ignited a Twitter beef with Russian internet sensation Hasbulla Magomedov on Wednesday, causing uproar in the process.
Later deleting his tweets in a well-worn tactic, the Irishman went on an all-out attack against the prankster by saying: "I'd love to boot that little gimp Hasbulla over a goal post."
"How much to get him on the volley?" McGregor asked, adding: "I'm gonna make it my mission to score a 3 pointer with him one day, hon the gaa," in reference to the Gaelic Athletic Association and the popular sport of Gaelic football in his homeland.
"Little smelly inbred," McGregor added in a separate tweet.
Quick to fire back, Hasbulla noted that he doesn't "follow bums" so therefore didn't know that "someone was running their mouth."
"At least one of us kept an undefeated record. Hasbulla 1. McGregor 0," he menaced, in a nod to McGregor's six defeats in the octagon.
With Hasbulla currently on a tour of Australia, he found support from Alexander Volkanovski – the current holder of the UFC featherweight crown that McGregor once owned.
"You'll have to go through me first. Leave my mate alone," Volkanovski warned, tagging 'The Notorious'.
Hasbulla will also find backing from McGregor's sworn enemy Khabib Nurmagomedov, who beat him in the UFC's most lucrative pay-per-view smash of all time for the lightweight title in 2018.
In another post on the matter by a popular MMA journalist, Hasbulla popped up in the replies with a "send location" demand, as made famous by Nurmagomedov.
Hasbulla and McGregor do have previous, though, after Hasbulla posted an online video in August with a farmyard animal saying: "This is my chicken named Conor McGregor. There's my beauty."
This is an insult that Nurmagomedov also fired at McGregor at the height of their rivalry, and as McGregor's Russian gym partner Artem Lobov explained, it is an offensive slur in Russia.
"If you call someone a chicken in Russia, that is a person that gets raped in prison – in male prison.
"That's what a chicken is in Russia. And Khabib knows that, and everybody knows that. It is a very, very, severe insult," Lobov remarked.
Online, McGregor found little sympathy from onlookers that criticized him for laying into Hasbulla, who was born with a growth hormone deficiency.
"Dude talking about hurting an individual with a rare disease is never the PR you want for a celebrity," said one.
"New low?" someone else asked. "I'm not sure that beats punching an old man to be fair," they added, mentioning an incident in a Dublin pub in 2019 where McGregor hit an elderly patron in a dispute over whiskey.
"With the way Conor’s training is looking I got Hasbulla by first round sub," was a more light-hearted comment, as McGregor continues to spend more time aboard his Lamborghini luxury yacht these days than in the gym preparing for his comeback.
Should he manage to get back in shape, though, McGregor is rumored to be in line for another shot at the 155lbs crown in Brazil if Charles Oliveira can win the vacant strap against Nurmagomedov's protege Islam Mackhachev.