• UFC 143

St-Pierre should have been begging to fight me - Diaz

Nick Diaz insists he is the man Georges St-Pierre needs to beat © Getty Images

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• Profile: Georges St-Pierre

Nick Diaz has questioned the courage of Georges St-Pierre by claiming a true champion would not have needed to be backed into a corner in order to fight.

Diaz and St-Pierre will finally step into the same Octagon at UFC 143, but only after a troubled path to the fight being made.

The pair were supposed to battle at UFC 137, only for Diaz to be pulled due to a series of missed media calls. He reacted by stating his belief that St-Pierre should have insisted that he wanted to fight Diaz - the Strikeforce welterweight champion.

However, Diaz now has his crack at UFC gold after he called out GSP in the aftermath of his win over BJ Penn. Diaz's ramblings painted him in a bad light, which is symptomatic of his entire career, but he insists he only called out St-Pierre because the champion did not take it upon himself to make the fight happen.

"I had to come out and do what I had to do and fight, and come out all dramatic and act up, and next thing you know, I got a fight, so I'm sure he can't blame me for that," Diaz told Fight Hype.

"That fight is important anyway because that's the fight that people want to see because I beat all of these important people. I have three Strikeforce belts. If I was him, I would be asking to fight me.

"If he would have automatically asked for it, then we wouldn't be in this situation he's in where he's not saying nothing. He should have said, 'This is who I want to fight.'"

Diaz has won Strikeforce, WEC and IFC welterweight titles throughout his career without losing any of them before leaving the respective promotions. In his eyes, there isn't a bigger scalp out there for St-Pierre.

"It's not about being a challenger; it's about who is champion at the weight. I'm holding three titles, you know?" Diaz said. "And I've got that DREAM champion too, so you can make that four.

"It's just as important as anything else and I know I would want to fight another champion before I would want to fight a high contender. Even if I know that high contender is better than the champion, I would still want to fight the champion because he's considered the best guy. That's the route I would have took."

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