Petr Yan has a message ahead of his trilogy with Merab Dvalishvili: “Yan Island is back,” as MMA Sucka put it in its headline, and the champion has a specific idea of how he plans to keep it that way.
Yan told MiddleEasy he’s expecting the same wrestling pressure Dvalishvili has brought in both of their previous fights. His answer is to take the initiative from the start. Make Merab react, instead of spending 25 minutes reacting to Merab. That’s a short plan, but anyone who has watched Dvalishvili drag opponents into a pace they never agreed to knows it’s the only plan that matters.
The fight co-headlines UFC 333 on Oct. 24 at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi. Yan (20-5 MMA, 12-4 UFC) defends the bantamweight title he took from Dvalishvili (21-2 MMA, 14-3 UFC) at UFC 323 last December. That win ended a reign in which the Georgian had stacked three successful title defenses inside a single year. Their series sits at 1-1, and neither result was close. Dvalishvili controlled the first fight, and Yan flipped the script just as thoroughly in the rematch.
The oddsmakers trust the most recent tape. FightOdds.io has Yan as a -180 favorite, with Dvalishvili at +155.
Dvalishvili isn’t leaning on 50 minutes of shared Octagon time to tell him what’s coming. Speaking to MMA Junkie, he said familiarity helps and also doesn’t, pointing out that the two fights produced two different results because they happened on two different days with two different mindsets. He also made it clear the press conference got under his skin a little. Yan made fun of him there, and Dvalishvili called him rude as a person while crediting him as a good fighter and a family man. His prediction for how it ends: “I need to win against him and then he will be humbled.”
The Georgian has stayed busy outside the cage too, appearing in Real American Freestyle wrestling matches, according to Bloody Elbow. Whether that sharpens the takedown game Yan is bracing for is something we’ll see in Abu Dhabi.
The winner already has a name waiting. Dvalishvili told MMA Junkie that if he takes the belt back, Song Yadong is next, fresh off his upset knockout of Umar Nurmagomedov at UFC Shanghai. If Yan wins, Dvalishvili figures it’s Sean O’Malley, because of the history between them.
Yan’s name even surfaced in an unrelated fight this week. Farid Basharat, explaining his release from the UFC on his YouTube channel, argued that going to decisions doesn’t make a fighter boring, and used Yan as his example: he said Yan hasn’t finished anybody in more than six years yet is arguably the most entertaining fighter on the roster.
Above them on the card, Alexander Volkanovski defends the featherweight title against unbeaten Movsar Evloev (20-0) in the main event.
My take: Yan has this exactly right, and it’s the reason the second fight looked the way it did. Dvalishvili’s whole engine depends on volume. Shots, reshots, scrambles, more shots, until the other guy’s legs and decision-making give out somewhere around the third round. When Yan lets Merab set the tempo, he spends the night defending. When Yan walks forward and makes him pay for every entry, Merab’s wrestling starts to look like a liability. The danger is that Dvalishvili knows this too and has a year of wrestling mats and RAF matches to show for it. I’ll lean Yan, but I want to see the first two minutes of Round 1 before I trust that lean. Whoever is moving forward at 4:00 of the opening round probably leaves with the belt on Oct. 24.
