If you’re eating, you might want to put down the knife and fork for a few minutes.
Last night, the Cage Warriors MMA promotion hosted an event out in London, England, headlined by a featherweight title fight between Harry Hardwick and Javier Garcia.
That main event sadly ended by technical decision after a nasty clash of heads, although the headlines this morning are instead dominated by a fight from earlier in the night – one that ended with perhaps the most disgusting eye injury that we’ve ever seen.
Doctor calls off fight after disgusting injury at Cage Warriors 186
Eight of the 14 fights at Cage Warriors 186 ended via stoppage, the ‘worst’ of which undoubtedly arrived in the lightweight bout between England’s Tariq Pell and Albania’s Ermil Xhaferi.
Towards the end of the first round, Pell landed a powerful strike that dazed Xhaferi, who then made the mistake of blowing his assumed-broken nose… Almost immediately, his right eye socket began to swell up.
“You can literally see – as he blows the nose – you can literally see the eye swell up like a balloon,” stated the commentary team, with the real-time footage showing just how quickly the injury worsened.
The ringside physician was called in to look at the injury, although the examination wasn’t extensive – one look from the doctor and the fight was understandably waved off.
Speaking after the fight, Pell demanded that the media “call it a knockout” and not a doctor’s stoppage as was announced in the cage: “He couldn’t continue, so it’s a knockout.
“If you’re on the battlefield and that happened, I’d come and cut his head off because he wasn’t ready to carry on… Job done.”
MMA fans react to Ermil Xhaferi’s horrific fight-ending eye injury
Unsurprisingly, clips of Xhaferi’s fight-ending eye injury have gone viral on social media, with the general reaction of the wider MMA community being variations of ‘Oh my God, that’s horrific’.
“Bro is channeling his inner Harvey Dent,” wrote one fan on X, with another adding that Xhaferi had “literally turned into a Claymation fighter from Celebrity Deathmatch.”
“Oh. My. God. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an eye that bad.”
“Bro blew up like he was allergic to being punched in the face,” joked another viewer, with one fan pointing to the actions of the referee: “Shout Marc Goddard for trying to let him know not to do that.”
The victory sees Tariq Pell move to 5-1 as a professional, whilst Xhaferi drops to 5-2-1.
