Bellator: How Sinead Kavanagh returned to fighting from potentially 'career-ending' knee injury in just 12 months

Sinead Kavanagh was in the midst of battle with Leah McCourt when she felt something strange happen to her knee.

She slipped in the second round, already injured, and her entire left knee began to go numb.

With a minute left in the round, she collapsed backwards, wincing in pain as she did. The Dublin native has endured some awful injuries in the past, breaking her eye socket during a fight, but nothing like this.

"I went to the corner afterwards, I'm grabbing my knee because it was at me," she remembers.

"I said to my coach, John, 'my knee is gone John, it's killing me'. He said, 'you have two don't you!' I was waiting for the that. There's no quit."

Kavanagh says she had no option. She had to continue, despite the pain rapidly increasing.

"I knew I had to win," she says. "I just grinded my teeth and said screw my leg, I'll saw it off and fight with one leg. It was just a dead limb.

"I had no power, nothing off it. I couldn't stand on it. It was killing me."

Kavanagh and her team were confident she was two rounds up before the third. On one leg, she survived the last five minutes.

"It was the worst thing to happen to me in my career," Kavanagh admits.

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The pain was so intense by the end, she was carried out of the cage by Kavanagh and her SBG team-mate Conor McGregor.

"I didn't know how bad it was," she says. The medics backstage told her she had probably torn her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). An injury that can often change the trajectory of an athlete's career.

They put her in a wheelchair, one of the wheels was broken and she kept banging into the wall.

Kavanagh was 36 at the time and after the swelling went down, scans showed a complete tear of her ACL and the medial collateral ligament (MCL).

It meant at least a year out of action, possibly more.

"It is career-ending," Kavanagh says. "It is an injury that can end things. I've got screws in my knee to keep my leg attached to my knee."

Kavanagh had surgery in April and was laid up in bed as a result.

"Literally couldn't do a tap," she says. "I had to be carried into the shower and to the toilet. I was in an awful way.

"I was doing the rehab in the my bed. I could only do it in my bed, lifting the leg up and down, trying to do little movement."

Sinead Kavanagh was 36 when she suffered the knee injury fighting Leah McCourt

The "baby steps", as she puts it, went on for months with little pay-off.

She had the support of her partner and her team-mates, like McGregor who had suffered the same injury in the past when he was 25.

Two-weight UFC champion McGregor urged her to "trust the process" but Kavanagh admits she had some low moments.

"It was very lonely," Kavanagh explains. "I did think I wouldn't come back. I didn't think my knee would be the same."

September rolled around and Kavanagh faced a crossroads. It was an open secret Bellator would be back in Dublin in February 2023.

"People are out for two years with this injury," she says. "In my head I just didn't have that time. I just turned 37. I want to be world champion.

"I don't think my goal is final until I get what I want, complete the dream.

"That's when I gave myself the goal to fight in February."

Kavanagh went back to training at the start of December. She only took part in warm-ups to begin with, then progressed slowly to striking and jiu-jitsu.

Wrestling and kicking came last, as it often does with fighters returning from knee injuries.

"I wasn't the thinnest. None of my leggings would fit me. I had to go get shorts from Penny's. I was training and just did the warm up at the start. But it was something to get me out of the bed and go there," she remembers.

"I was afraid to get kicked and taken down. The only way to do that is to get kicked and taken down."

"It was a mental block in my head," she adds. "I was thinking I don't want to be kicked.

"But once I let it happen, it was absolutely fine. I've been kicked now and stamped on."

Kavanagh faces New Zealand's Janay Harding on Saturday in Dublin in a rematch of their 2018 encounter.

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That fight was stopped because of a cut to Kavanagh in the first round. Kavanagh blames an inexperienced cutman for that decision, adamant she should have been allowed to continue.

But Saturday is one year to the day since Kavanagh beat McCourt in the same venue, the 3Arena.

"The anniversary of the ACL," as Kavanagh puts it, laughing.

"My career is like a rollercoaster. The fact I am even back to where I am is extraordinary as well, to be fighting in a year's time.

"It's mixed bag of emotions I have. I have been emotional, crying and everything. But I'm ready."