Merab Dvalishvili says he knew in the second round of his UFC 323 rematch with Petr Yan that he wasn’t going to win. Speaking to UFC on Paramount+, as reported by Bloody Elbow, the Georgian said a single stuffed takedown attempt early in that round drained him and forced him to rethink the whole night.
He’d walked into Round 2 meaning to put Yan on the mat. He threw everything into the shot, Yan held his ground, and Dvalishvili found himself suddenly tired and short on answers.
“In ten seconds, all my energy came out,” he said, describing the moment he asked himself what came next and concluded he couldn’t get Yan down. His answer was to stand and fight.
He was blunt about where that left him. “I realized in the second fight, I was not going to win this fight and I was just going to enjoy the fight.”
What happened last December
The numbers back up his memory. Yan defended 27 of the 29 takedowns Dvalishvili attempted that night, a staggering figure against a man whose grappling pressure had worn down most of the people put in front of him. Yan took a unanimous decision, won the bantamweight title, and snapped a dominant win streak that had made Dvalishvili look close to untouchable.
It was also a reversal of their first meeting. That fight went so heavily Dvalishvili’s way that few people expected the belt to change hands in the rematch, which is part of why the result landed so hard.
Nothing about the way Dvalishvili fought in December gave away what was going on in his head. He kept coming forward, kept working, and did it smiling, the way he usually does. That fits with something else he told UFC on Paramount+: “I’m just happy, win, loss, good fight, bad fight, I’m just happy and I just try to enjoy.” So the joy wasn’t some new coping tactic he discovered mid-fight. It seems to be how he’s wired.
The trilogy was 11 days away when Bloody Elbow published the interview, with Dvalishvili now the one chasing the title.
Quick take
I like that he said it plainly. Most fighters protect the story of a loss for years, and here’s a former champion admitting, before the rubber match, that he felt it slipping away 10 seconds into a round. The useful part for the trilogy is the detail inside the confession. His whole game was built on a gas tank that never seemed to empty, and one hard-defended shot was enough to empty it, at least for a moment. Yan figured that out. Dvalishvili clearly knows Yan figured it out. Whatever his corner has drilled since December, his Round 2 needs a second option ready before the first takedown fails, because Yan already showed he can stuff 27 of them and still have plenty left over to win.
