Merab Dvalishvili’s coach reveals slew of injuries ahead of UFC 311 win over Umar Nurmagomedov

Merab Dvalishvili was dealing with quite a 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 according to his head coach John Wood, that’s not the only 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 pictures come out I’m sure in the next few days – but cuts all over. He left it, kept training through it, eventually got it stitched up too late, and then stitches busted, and then he restitched it, and then just his whole shin became infected. It was a concern of even getting cleared for this fight. The infection, like the staph infection was gone, but the skin we were really afraid of to the point 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 show any kind of weakness. I don’t care. It’s fine. If it breaks open, it breaks open.’ So we had that, and basically he couldn’t use that leg for the entire camp. Then dealing with being on antibiotics and all that kind of sh*t, and then his back. He said it the other day. UFC ‘Embedded’ came by or ‘Countdown,’ and he was out doing his workout in the street and he jumped up the wrong way and then pinched nerve, pinched the vertebrae and couldn’t walk for a week. So I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ So it was a complicated camp.”

However, Wood says once Dvalishvili made 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 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 in the gym told me what I needed to know,” Wood said. “I just needed to make sure that his mind was on board when he got into that cage, and that is something about Merab that you cannot teach. It is just in him.

“He knows how to lock in the day of the fight. Everything changes and you can just see the weight cut. Once the weight cut is done, he’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have a blast.’ He just switches into, ‘I am going to go out there, fight my ass off and have fun.’ Once I saw that in the morning for the shakeout, I was like, ‘Oh man, it’s going to be a great night.’”

For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 311.