Pedro Marinho recently called out Nicholas Meregali and it looks as though he’s going to get his wish, as Meregali has now verbally agreed to a match between them. Marinho made the callout after he successfully defended his Who’s Number One light-heavyweight title against Giancarlo Bodoni in a virtually flawless performance. Ironically, the only reason that the match between Marinho and Bodoni was scheduled for this event was because another match featuring Meregali fell through. Immediately after Marinho was announced as the winner of his match with Bodoni, he was asked to give his thoughts on the fight:
“Never call me out. I’m somebody really tough in this game. I’ve been fighting the best a while, it wasn’t yesterday and it wasn’t last year. It’s been five years at this level, since purple belt. So put some respect on my name.”
Marinho didn’t stop there though, he also announced who he wanted his next opponent to be. It seems as though he wants to keep his next match in theme, as Giancarlo Bodoni is actually Meregali’s teammate at New Wave Jiu-Jitsu:
“I wanna face Meregali. I just got Bodoni, now I want to fight Meregali from New Wave.”
To his credit, Meregali wasted no time in responding to the callout and he seemed eager to meet Marinho on the mats:
“You deserved to make the call. Let’s do it, Flo have my number”
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the pair finally do face one another, and whether that will be in gi or no gi competition. Given that Marinho made the callout after defending his Who’s Number One title and Meregali’s response encouraged FloGrappling to contact him, it seems likely that this will take place on a future WNO event. Given that WNO have already been open about the fact that they don’t have any interest in staging gi matches, it seems as though this will likely be a no gi match instead.
The post-fight interview where Pedro Marinho calls out Nicholas Meregali for a match was uploaded to the official Instagram account of FloGrappling:
