Petr Yan’s coach went back to the drawing board for the Merab Dvalishvili trilogy, and he came out with five pages.
The UFC bantamweight champion said on The Ariel Helwani Show that Kairat Nurmagambetov has built a much thicker game plan for Saturday’s UFC 333 co-main event in Abu Dhabi than the one that carried Yan past Dvalishvili last December.
“Last time it was a one-page plan. This time he prepared a five-page plan,” Yan said. “It looks more like a football team practice than an MMA game plan. For every situation, there’s a detailed breakdown.”
Yan admitted he ribs his coach about the volume. “Sometimes I tell him, ‘It’s not a football game,’ but he prefers really detailed preparation. This time it’s even more detailed than last time,” he said.
That’s a fighter answering a question straight, which I’ll always take.
How we got here
The one-pager already has a little history. After Yan beat Dvalishvili by unanimous decision at UFC 323 to take the bantamweight title, Nurmagambetov showed off the document, which laid out every scenario for Yan depending on how the fight played out. It worked. Dvalishvili spent the night trying to solve a problem he never cracked.
That win squared the series. Almost three years earlier, Dvalishvili handed Yan a convincing loss in a UFC Fight Night main event, so Saturday is the tiebreaker, and it comes just 10 months after the rematch.
UFC 333 goes down October 24. Yan and Dvalishvili are the co-main, sitting underneath Alexander Volkanovski’s featherweight title defense against Movsar Evloev.
Trouble in the challenger’s corner
Dvalishvili’s camp has its own homework and at least one headache. His coach, Ray Longo, has said he’s worried about how a close fight might look to the judges because Dvalishvili is walking in with a broken nose that was never fixed. Longo’s fear is that it could bleed a lot. For a guy who wins on pace and pressure, a face full of blood in a tight round is the kind of thing that can tilt a scorecard the wrong way.
Nobody should assume ‘The Machine’ is showing up with the same plan that lost at UFC 323, either. The guy coming off the loss usually changes more than the guy coming off the win, and Dvalishvili’s team has had 10 months to figure out where it went wrong.
Quick take
I love that Yan’s coach treats a title fight like an NFL playbook, and I love even more that Yan openly teases him about it. But five pages is only as good as page one surviving contact with Dvalishvili’s pace, and the first time these two met, Yan had no answer for it. The real edge might be the nose Longo is fretting about. If Dvalishvili starts leaking in Round 1, every one of those five pages gets easier to follow. We find out Saturday in Abu Dhabi.
