Breakdown | Merab Dvalishvili vs Sean O'Malley 2
I said in the picks article for The MMA Draw that I thought Merab was the fighter who had more room for improvement in the rematch, and that proved to be true.
By not overly respecting O'Malley's counters and instead just getting after him, Merab was able to snowball his own offensive game sooner while limiting the time O'Malley had to set something big up.
Comments (5)
Excellent breakdown. Very frustrating fight as a sean fan but impressive as a merab hater (more so disliker?) Seeing sean get the front foot then just back away any time merab feint’s forward bugged me Sean feels as if he could beat merab but just lacks the ability to put everything together when the time comes He seemed not at all confident
I do think Sean thinking to much about the takedown did hamper his counter and back foot game. He is actually really good fighting going backwards where even Yan(best pressure fighter in the ufc) was having a hard time landing meaningful strikes when O’Malley was going backwards. You could tell in the sequences where Sean was on the back foot against mean he was really trying to anticipate the takedown leaving his hands down getting caught. In the third when he actually started to pick up his hands more going backwards he got taken down. He really has to work on his defensive wrestling once an opponent has made contact and his ability to get up so that his striking doesn’t not get impeded which I believe is much better than he showed last fight.
Definitely. Similar thing happened to Poirier against Islam. His usual counters weren't there because he was completely focused on takedown defense.
Classic case of decent tactics/adjustments for Sean not feeding into an overall strategy that's geared for success. I credit a lot of the podcasts you've been doing, along with Jack Slack and Heavy Hands with me being able to spot that, even though Sean was having moments of success defending takedowns, he was continuously ceding the initiative to Merab.
100%!