Marlon Vera had choice words for Sean O'Malley's corner following his first-round TKO win at UFC 252.
Vera postponed the "Suga Show" at UFC 252 after putting him away with vicious ground-and-pound. A heated Vera had a message to deliver to O'Malley's corner after the fight. The winning fighter approached the corner because of some things they had said before and during the bout.
“The guy was snoring,” Vera said at the UFC 252 post-fight press conference (via Alexander K. Lee of MMA Fighting). “When I landed the second elbow, he was making noises, he was out. And then when Herb Dean got in the middle, you could see [O’Malley’s] head bounce back. I see his corner saying, ‘No, that was too early.’ We make eye contact and I was like, ‘You know that sh*t wasn’t early,’ and the guy was pretty quiet all of a sudden. That guy was talking sh*t while we were getting ready to walk to the cage. He was yelling, ‘He’s slow.’ It’s like, dude, it’s a fu**ing fight, if you want to try to get in my head, you’ve got to try harder than that. So I was just like, the only way to make you pay is fu**ing your kid up.”
O’Malley suffered an injury towards the end of the fight, which Vera has said was due to the strikes he landed before the finishing sequence. The fighter says a controversial loss to Song Yadong in his last bout is what motivated him in the fight against O’Malley.
“I believe I’m a solid top-10,” Vera said. “I’ve been making damage in the division. What happened in the last fight got me pretty upset, got me pretty angry, and actually made me do what I did tonight. I wasn’t happy. I was pushing myself a little harder. I was being hard on me. I don’t give myself vacation, I don’t give myself cheat days. I was like, it’s time to dig deep and that’s when I find myself even better. I came to this fight with a mission. I cannot let this happen again in my life. That was terrible. They take half of my check, they cut a pretty sweet winning streak, which—I’m at seven right now, I don’t care what they say, I’m on [a seven-fight] winning streak.”
Vera has now won six straight fights in the UFC bantamweight division and has not been defeated by another 135-pounder in almost three years.
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