Merab Dvalishvili was facing quite a bit of adversity heading into UFC 311.
Bantamweight champion Dvalishvili (19-4 MMA, 12-2 UFC) rallied to defeat Umar Nurmagomedov (18-1 MMA, 6-1 UFC) by unanimous decision last Saturday at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, in California.
During fight week, Dvalishvili had a visible gash on his leg, but according to his head coach John Wood, that’s not the only thing he was suffering from.
“He got his leg cut off on our stands,” Wood told Submission Radio. “He was walking by the stands and literally – you’ll see the photos come out, I’m sure in the next few days – but he has cuts everywhere. He left it on, kept training, ended up sewing it up too late, then the stitches broke, then he sewed it up again, and that’s when his whole shin got infected. It was a concern to even be allowed to participate in this fight. The infection, like the staph infection, was gone, but the skin really scared us to the point where we got the commission to approve his packaging, that he was going to do the Luke Rockhold thing.
“But Merab said, ‘No, I’m not going to show any kind of weakness.’ I don’t care. It’s good. If he opens up, he opens up. So we had that, and basically he couldn’t use that leg the whole camp. taking antibiotics and all that kind of shit, and then his back He said it the other day UFC “Embedded” happened or “Countdown”, and he was training in. the street and he jumped the wrong way, then pinched a nerve, a vertebra and couldn’t walk for a week, so I was like, “Oh my God, that was a tough camp.”
However, Wood says that once Dvalishvili gained weight, he put all that behind him. After losing the first two rounds on two of the judges’ scorecards, Dvalishvili was able to outlast Nurmagomedov and win the final three rounds.
“But overall, with all that being said, and I told Merab, it didn’t matter how good he looked in his sparring. His performance in the gym told me what I needed to know,” Wood said. “I just had to make sure his spirit was on board when he walked into that cage, and that’s something about Merab you can’t teach. It’s just in him.
“He knows how to lock in the fight day. Everything changes and you can just see the weight reduction. Once he cut the weight, he was like, “Oh my God, I’m going to have a blast.” » He just says: “I’m going to go out there, fight and have fun.” Once I saw that in the morning for the shakeout, I was like, ‘Oh man, this is going to be a good night.’
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 311.