If Movsar Evloev wins Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 270 main event vs. Lerone Murphy, it’s going to come after some pre-fight challenges.
Evloev arrived late in London for fight week for his featherweight showdown with Murphy at The O2 (Paramount+), and he wrote on social media that the delay was due to a “fuss” with his travel.
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With a track record of fight cancellations, some of which were due to his withdrawal and others for a variety of other circumstances, Evloev has not always built up the most trust for reliability. He claims this one wouldn’t have been his fault, but he knew the backlash would come anyway.
Evloev (19-0 MMA, 9-0 UFC) eventually made it to “The Big Smoke,” and the fight with Murphy (17-0-1 MMA, 9-0-1 UFC) is on.
“I wasn’t worried about getting here because trust me, I tried to get here probably more than anybody else in the history of trying to get to London,” Evloev told MMA Junkie through an interpreter on Wednesday. “I was like the No. 1 trier to get to London. That’s not what really what was on my mind. What I was more worried about is that I need to come out and I need to fight. I need to show people. I need to show everybody, because I’m a competitor. I really like the competition aspect of it. I wanted to show the people the levels. The work that I put in to get where I am. This No. 1 next to my name is not there just because it looks pretty. It’s there because this is what I worked for.
“The worst thing coming through my head was that, ‘If I’m not going to make it here, then everybody is going to say, ‘Well, it’s his fault.” It would’ve been not for the fault of my own because I did everything I could. The rest was out of my hands. Whoever figures it out or whoever fixes these things, this is whose fault it was. But at the end, they were all going to look at me and say, ‘It’s Movsar’s fault.’ But you can’t control what you cannot control. All I was hoping was that I would come out here and show the levels that I have.”
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According to Evloev, the issues entering England weren’t the only hurdles that could’ve potentially prevented him from stepping in the octagon this weekend. He was coy about what exactly what meant, but expressed that nothing about the final stretch into fight week has been easy.
“It’s more than just VISAs and documents and other things that I had to go through in the past couple weeks that I went through, which I do not want to talk about,” Evloev said. “It’s not the time to talk about them right now. Maybe afterwards, after the fight, if somebody is interested, I can reveal a couple things I had to deal with. But it wasn’t just important to get here, what was important was to get here and show that I’ve been preparing for this, and show that none of the things that got in the way affected my preparation or my level that I would like to show. Not just with the documents, but just in general, the amount of stuff I had to deal with, I couldn’t even sit down with my family and talk with them about how they’re doing. I wasn’t online just sitting on my phone.
“I’m very quiet for the past couple of weeks because I was so busy that with all of those different distractions, what was important to me is I sleep well, I eat well, I prepare well though all of those things, trying to stay focused and maintaining all that composure. I literally had time for nothing else.”
Ultimately, Evloev said what’s done is done, and he is prepared to beat fellow undefeated contender Murphy and prove he is finally ready for a championship opportunity against Alexander Volkanovski.
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“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” Evloev said. “This is something that helped me out. This is something that made me understand no matter what’s thrown at me, I am mentally stronger than all my opponents. I am levels above the rest of them because none of this stuff is going to affect what I have to do.”
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Movsar Evloev says he’s not rattled after UFC London travel issues
