The UFC almost dealt with yet another change to the main event of UFC Sao Paulo but thanks to Thiago Santos, it stayed in tack for the most part.
It’s been well established that Santos was supposed with Jimi Manuwa in the headliner of this show that went down on Saturday, September 22, 2018 at Ginásio do Ibirapuera in São Paulo, Brazil that aired on FOX Sports 1. A light heavyweight bout between former UFC title challenger Glover Teixeira andManuwa was the original fight for the headliner. This fight got scrapped once Teixeira pulled out last month due to a shoulder injury and was later replaced by Santos. Then Manuwa had to pull out because of an injury. Thus, the promotion got Eryk Anders to step-in on short-notice.
Santos was able to score a TKO win over Anders at the end of the third round due to referee stoppage. In a recent interview, Santos’ coach Tata Duarte stated that his fighter suffered a thigh injury eight days before the fight as he had muscle strain after going for a suplex in the gym.
“He went down in pain,” Duarte said to MMAFighting. “We stopped training and sent him to our physical therapist Bernardo Moura to check him out and start the treatment. Bernardo knew the injury, it was the same one he had in Brasilia against Spicely, but it was worse against Spicely.”
“Bernardo said that the ideal would be two weeks of recovery, but we only had one. We did physical therapy for three days and went to Sao Paulo on Sunday. The UFC sent their physical therapist, Bob, on Monday and we kept the treatment.”
Prior to this fight, Santos’ last outing resulted in a victory over Kevin Holland at UFC 227. Before that pay-per-view event, he suffered a first-round knockout loss to David Branch that ended a four-fight win streak. Although he never thought about pulling out of the fight, his coaches did consider it. However, he pushed on.
“I did physical therapy with Bob all week,” Santos told MMA Fighting. “I felt a horrible pain, the treatment was painful. Thank God I didn’t need to cut much weight so I didn’t have to worry about training that hard, but we did physical therapy all week up until Saturday morning.”
”When the opponent changed, we couldn’t work his takedown defense, nothing, and we were worried because we knew Anders would try to take him down. There were moments in the fight that ‘Marreta’ gave him the takedown to avoid forcing the injury, but thank God everything went right.”
