After eye-poke, Glover Teixeira says he was seeing “three Gustafssons”

Last weekend, the UFC touched down in Stockholm, Sweden with an exciting 12-fight card. In the main event, the fighting pride of Sweden himself, Alexander Gustafsson, scored an impressive, fifth-round knockout win over the dangerous Glover Teixeira.

For Teixeira, things obviously didn’t go as planned – and not only because he got knocked out. The Brazilian finisher also sustained an unfortunate eye-poke mid-way through the fight, which he says affected him significantly, though he does not attribute his loss to this accidental foul.

“If I tell you that that didn’t disturb me, that’s a lie,” Teixeira said told MMAFighting.com. “Everybody knows, a fighter or not, that getting poked in the eye like that, it was strong, so that disturbed me. But if I had gotten knocked out right after that, I’d definitely blame it. I went back in there without seeing anything. I was seeing three Gustafssons. It was all blurry, but I thought I’d have five minutes (to recover).”

Unfortunately for Teixeira, referee Marc Goddard could not give him his desired five minutes of recovery time.

“I don’t know if you saw this, but I told the (referee) ‘of course I’ll come back to fight, but I need a time to, I don’t know, rub my eyes, wait to recover’. But he said ‘you get no time, you get no time. Or you’re good to come back or you’re not.’”

“I didn’t know if they would cancel the fight, if it would be a no contest, but I didn’t want that. Of course not,” Teixeira continued. “I’m a fighter and I believe I had chances to defeat him, otherwise I wouldn’t even be fighting. But I think that, without that eye poke, maybe I’d be able to impose my game, at least in the first round.”

Teixeira then reiterated that he does not take anything away from Gustafsson’s win:

“Regardless, I think that, the way he was fighting, the speed… he was better, I couldn’t find him. After my eye got better, I couldn’t find him. The result would really have been the same. Maybe not the knockout, a closer fight, but the result would have been the same.

“Congratulations to Gustafsson. He fought me in the best shape of my life, no injuries whatsoever. I have no excuses.”

What did you think of Alexander Gustafsson’s win over Glover Teixeira?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 5/30/2017.