Cook’s recipe for ultimate success

When Garry Cook and the UFC roll into town, they don’t just set up or stay anywhere.

The Gibson Hotel is a pure new-world hotel, glassy, swanky, hip, high-ceilinged, the kind you’d imagine Cook in his Manchester City days would have frequented with members of the Abu Dhabi royal family and plotted world football domination.

Here on a fantastic sunny morning, the high-rise hotel seems to overlook, even overlord everything: the O2 next door which is sold out for tonight’s UFC event, the riverside, Dublin itself. Conor McGregor has gone so far to say that the entire country will come to a standstill tonight, with his oyster the world to follow next. While those claims might seem a tad hyperbolic, they are in keeping with McGregor’s vision and personality and in many ways with Cook’s too.