Alf Global<\/a>. \u201cIf I had fought, I could\u2019ve become champion, but that\u2019s how it turned out. I was injured. What can I do? We are only human. We are bound to make plenty of mistakes. \u2026<\/p>\n\u201cI actually shouldn\u2019t even have fought Ian Garry at all. With injuries like that, I shouldn\u2019t have fought at all, I just took a risk. That\u2019s the Kazakh way. Kazakhs are very daring. They\u2019re not afraid. If it had been some other Dagestani fighter like Khabib or Islam Makhachev, they definitely would\u2019ve refused.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rakhmonov put over Machado Garry as a great and well-rounded fighter, but obviously believes had he been healthy, it would\u2019ve been a victory by a wider margin.<\/p>\n
\u201cI already had an injury going into the Ian Garry fight,\u201d Rakhmonov explained. \u201cI stepped in, I hadn\u2019t fought for a year, I wanted to fight. Even before that, I had health problems, too, and it turned out there were only two weeks left before the Ian Garry fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat old injury was still bothering me a lot. My leg was swollen. And when he was striking me, it was probably because I completely lacked a ligament. I couldn\u2019t really feel that strike, in general.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rakhmonov was on the road to a return to the octagon before re-injuring his knee again that has kept him out of action another full year. \u201cNomad\u201d is 19-0, including a 7-0 run in the UFC \u2014 stopping the likes of Stephen Thompson, Geoff Neal and Neil Magny.<\/p>\n
Makhachev had recently said prior to his UFC 330 title defense against Machado Garry that he doesn\u2019t believe Rakhmonov will fight again after the injuries he has sustained. He hopes to return to action in 2027, but Rakhmonov would be lying if he said it\u2019s 100 percent he\u2019ll return to the UFC.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u201cTime will tell,\u201d Rakhmonov said. \u201cIt\u2019s too early to say anything yet. I\u2019ll do my best to come back and win the title. Time will reveal everything.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shavkat Rakhmonov hasn\u2019t competed since defeating Ian Machado Garry, essentially on one leg, after dealing with knee injuries…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":885821,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,82,640,702],"class_list":["post-885820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=885820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/885821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=885820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=885820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=885820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}