“DC didn’t realize I only had three corners in there that night,” Lauren Murphy talks about Daniel Cormier’s criticism for her corner at UFC 266
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Lauren Murphy and Valentina Shevchenko
The number 3rd ranked UFC women’s Flyweight fighter, Lauren Murphy challenged Valentina Shevchenko for her title at the co-main event of UFC 266. Murphy tried her best to push Valentina to her limit but she was too much to handle for Lauren Murphy.
Valentina Shevchenko defeated her in the fourth round of the fight via TKO and in her latest interview with MMA Fighting, Lauren Murphy revealed that her head coach was tested positive for COVID right before the fight and she nearly pulled out her name from the fight at UFC 266.
While talking to Mike Hack, Murphy says, “Man, that sucked, because I’ve worked with him so closely throughout the camp, he’s the guy that does all the game planning, and I was 9-0 heading into this fight with Alex in my corner, That’s the one thing that was really like, ‘F*ck.’”
Murphy continued, “When we found out on Tuesday that he tested positive, the UFC quarantined him and made him leave the fighter hotel and that he couldn’t corner me on Saturday, at first, we were thinking we would pull out of the fight,”
“The odds of me showing up to a title fight being in that good of health probably weren’t very good and I thought, ‘If I pull out of the fight, what would happen?’ They’d probably put Cynthia in because Valentina would still want to fight, then I’d probably have to fight another No. 1 contender fight just to get back to the title again.” {H/T MMA Fighting}
Daniel Cormier questioned the approach of Lauren Murphy’s husband in between the rounds
Lauren Murphy admitted that during the first exchange with Valentina Shevchenko she realized that she never felt someone hitting her as Shevchenko did through her career of 20 fights.
To make things worse her coach was also not in her corner and in between the rounds Lauren Murphy’s husband, Joe was heard giving positive advice to her, which the former two-division UFC champion and ringside commentator, Daniel Cormier questioned about the approach of her corner.
Talking about this Murphy added, “I can’t say, ‘If Alex had been there, I would’ve won,’ I can’t say that, but I definitely would’ve felt more comfortable and I think I would’ve tried more things, I’m really comfortable in the corner asking Alex questions that I was wondering about and I just felt bad that ‘DC,’ I guess, got on Joe’s case so bad.”
“I haven’t watched the fight back or heard what he said, but a couple of people messaged us and called us saying he was ragging on Joe. I felt bad about it because DC didn’t realize I only had three corners in there that night, he didn’t realize our fourth guy was gone, the head guy, the sounding board for what was going on. Suddenly, we lost a major leg to the table, the support for this fight, so Joe was trying to do two jobs.”
In the end, Murphy concluded, “DC doesn’t know that though. Joe was probably trying to keep me from being discouraged, and it’s easy with a fighter like Valentina to get really discouraged and, truth be told, I was discouraged with the stuff with my coach, that first exchange where it was like, ‘I can’t take too many of those f*cking strikes,’ which made me timid.”
“In the second round I put her on the cage and I couldn’t move her at all, I couldn’t move her legs and my confidence was just getting chipped away. I think Joe was just trying to, in that moment, make sure my confidence wasn’t totally blown out. That was a big hurdle that we had. I tried to overcome it, I tried to tell myself this is the kind of stress champions deal with, and it was tough.” {H/T MMA Fighting}
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Shivansh Thakur
(1173 Articles Published)