Ahead of his second title defense, UFC bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili knows that he needs to be switched on.
‘The Machine’ is set to face Sean O’Malley in a rematch with the two men first meeting at UFC 306 last September where Dvalishvili defeated ‘Suga’ to win the 135 pound title.
While O’Malley may have a desired retirement age in mind, he still has a lot to accomplish and the first box to tick is reclaiming the bantamweight gold.
Having already got his hand raised against the exciting striker, Dvalishvili has already admitted that it’s not necessarily easy for him to get motivated about their June 7 rematch.
One of the ways that the champion is able to fire himself up is because he knows that this isn’t the case for his opponent, who is out for revenge at UFC 316.
Merab Dvalishvili finds motivation in knowing that Sean O’Malley is facing ‘everything or nothing’ stakes at UFC 316
From the moment that Sean O’Malley knocked out Aljamain Sterling at UFC 292 to win the bantamweight title, two things were immediately clear.
One being that his star status was going to continue shooting through the roof, the second that Merab Dvalishvili would pose a serious threat to his reign.
This proved to be correct at UFC 306 and though O’Malley hasn’t fought since losing the belt, he has made a lot of changes in his life to try to course-correct.
In an interview with Sterling, his long-time friend and training partner, Dvalishvili spoke about how he gets himself fired up for the rematch.
Along with wanting to keep hold of his belt with an even more impressive performance the second time around, ‘The Machine’ finds motivation in knowing that O’Malley has got a lot on the line.
The challenger is heading to Newark with the opportunity to avenge his last defeat or potentially get frozen out of the title picture by losing back-to-back fights to the champion.
“The second motivation is I know how hungry he is,” Dvalishvili said. “For him now, [it’s] either everything or nothing because he lost a lot of things. He made a lot of changes and I know how bad he wants to come back and I know he used to be champion, he had everything. Now he’s under and lots of people are down on him and now I’m sure he’s super motivated. He will go for a risk and stuff like this.”
What happened in the first fight between Merab Dvalishvili and Sean O’Malley?
Sean O’Malley has spoken about several factors that impacted his performance at UFC 306, including some injuries that he was dealing with ahead of the fight.
Many believed that the wrestling ability and unmatched cardio of the challenger would be too much for O’Malley and this proved to be the case with Merab Dvalishvili implementing his will for a lot of the fight.
However, despite how many fans felt when watching the fight live, the scorecards didn’t reflect the idea that it was one-way traffic in the main event of UFC 306.
The three judges saw the fight 49-46, 48-47 and 48-47, meaning that two scorecards only had Dvalishvili winning the fight by one round.
For many fans, it is the fifth round of their first encounter which makes the rematch interesting, with O’Malley hurting his opponent with a body shot before he ran out of time to truly capitalize on it.