Merab Dvalishvili was coping with quite a little bit of adversity leading 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 this past Saturday at Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif.
During fight week, there was a noticeable gash on Dvalishvili’s leg, but in accordance with his head coach John Wood, that’s not the one thing he was going through.
“He got his leg cut up on our bleachers,” Wood told Submission Radio. “He was walking by the bleachers and literally – you’ll see the photographs come out I’m sure in the subsequent few days – but cuts throughout. He left it, kept training through it, eventually got it stitched up too late, after which stitches busted, after which he restitched it, after which just his whole shin became infected. It was a priority of even getting cleared for this fight. The infection, just like the staph infection was gone, however the skin we were really afraid of to the purpose where we got the commission to approve getting it wrapped, that he was going to do the Luke Rockhold thing.
“But Merab’s like, ‘No, I’m not going to indicate any sort of weakness. I don’t care. It’s nice. If it breaks open, it breaks open.’ So we had that, and mainly he couldn’t use that leg for your entire camp. Then coping with being on antibiotics and all that sort of sh*t, after which his back. He said it the opposite day. UFC ‘Embedded’ got here by or ‘Countdown,’ and he was out doing his workout on the street and he jumped up the unsuitable way after which pinched nerve, pinched the vertebrae and couldn’t walk for per week. So I used to be like, ‘Oh my God.’ So it was a sophisticated camp.”
Nonetheless, Wood says once Dvalishvili made weight, he put all that behind him. After losing the primary two rounds on two of the judges’ scorecards, Dvalishvili was in a position to outlast Nurmagomedov and win the last three rounds.
“But all in all, with all that being said, and I told this to Merab, it didn’t matter how good he looked in his sparring. How good he was performing within the gym told me what I needed to know,” Wood said. “I just needed to be sure that that his mind was on board when he got into that cage, and that’s something about Merab that you simply cannot teach. It’s just in him.
“He knows easy methods to lock within the day of the fight. Every little thing changes and you’ll be able to just see the load cut. Once the load cut is completed, he’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have a blast.’ He just switches into, ‘I’m going to go on the market, fight my ass off and have a good time.’ Once I saw that within the morning for the shakeout, I used to be like, ‘Oh man, it’s going to be an important night.’”
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