Cory Sandhagen advises Sean O’Malley on how to beat UFC bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili.
After losing his title to Dvalishvili at UFC 306 by unanimous decision last September, O’Malley (18-2 MMA, 10-2 UFC) will run things back with Dvalishvili (19-4 MMA, 12-2 UFC) on June 7 in the UFC 316 headliner at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.
O’Malley struggled to mount any offense against Dvalishvili after he was stifled and controlled on the ground for five rounds. He managed to hurt Dvalishvili with a late body kick, but outside of that, it was largely Dvalishvili dominating the fight. Sandhagen thinks O’Malley needs to do a better job of capitalizing when Dvalishvili makes his entries and let his strikes go more instead of just looking for the kill shot.
“O’Malley’s real shot at winning this thing is a puncher’s chance, kind of,” Sandhagen said on the “MightyCast” with Demetrious Johnson. “Merab is going to take O’Malley down a number of times in this next fight. O’Malley’s ability to get up was really bad in his first fight with Merab. He was doing steps that he could have just – there’s better ways to stand up than the ways he was going about doing it. O’Malley is going to get taken down a lot, and hopefully he learned how to stand up a lot better, because getting taken down is going to happen. When you’re a long, lanky guy, it’s really hard to stop people from getting underneath you.
“So it’s not as much about defending the shot as much as it is, can I get up immediately? And if Sean does that a lot better, he’ll do a lot better in the next fight. Sean’s not really a point guy, he’s not going to score a bunch of nips and picks from the outside and try to win that way. O’Malley wants to put your lights out type of guy, and if he just continues to try to put Merab’s lights out, I think that’s just going to weigh against him. I think he needs really to control the pace of the fight, the scoring piece of the standup, so that if he does get taken down and he gets back up, he can start to engage.”
Sandhagen pointed to the mistakes both O’Malley and Umar Nurmagomedov did in their title-fight losses to Dvalishvili.
“I don’t think the answer to beating Merab is a ton of footwork and keeping space,” Sandhagen said. “I think O’Malley’s a lot longer, like Umar tried it, and O’Malley tried it the first time: Move your feet, keep a bunch of distance, and do it that way. That’s a way to do it, but when a guy has a massive gas tank that’s just like a superhero, I think that you just set your space and when Merab gets close to you, you hit that fool.
“And that sounds really simple and maybe not the most technical way, but I do think that’s a way to combat the conditioning piece. I don’t even think that he has to bring it to Merab, he just has to just try to counter him, but not counter and reset a thousand times. He just has to stand there, defend the shots as best he can, and when Merab gets close to him, just hit him.”
Sandhagen (17-5 MMA, 10-4 UFC) will look to stake his claim for a title shot when he meets Deiveson Figueiredo (24-4-1 MMA, 13-4-1 UFC) in Saturday’s UFC on ESPN 67 (ESPN2, ESPN+) main event at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, Iowa.
