Merab Dvalishvili walked into Etihad Arena with a face that still looked like a crime scene and walked out with a pin over Marlon Moraes. The former UFC bantamweight champion beat his old rival Saturday (Nov. 14) at RAF Abu Dhabi, a wrestling card that streamed live on FOX Nation, only a few days after he was attacked in the UAE.
The week leading up to it was ugly. MMA Mania’s Dan Hiergesell reported that Dvalishvili was jumped by Usman Nurmagomedov and what Hiergesell called “a collection of his goons.” The legal trouble landed on Dvalishvili too. According to that report, he spent time behind bars over his part in the incident and paid a small fine before he was released and cleared to compete.
That clearance came late enough that fans spent most of fight week guessing whether he’d stay on the card at all. A guy with a badly beaten face, fresh out of a cell in a foreign country, has every excuse in the world to fly home. Dvalishvili stayed.
The match
There was no rust and no hangover from the chaos. Hiergesell wrote that Dvalishvili looked locked in from the opening bell, which tracks for a man widely regarded as one of the best grapplers in the UFC’s 135-pound division. He kept working on Moraes, kept improving his position, and eventually got Moraes where he wanted him for the pin.
Moraes and Dvalishvili have shared a cage before, so this was a rematch of sorts under a different rulebook. Moraes made his name as a dangerous striker at bantamweight. A pure wrestling contest against Dvalishvili is about the worst matchup a striker can sign up for, and it played out about how the style clash suggested it would.
The coverage out of Abu Dhabi didn’t say anything about what comes next for either man, in RAF or back in MMA. It also didn’t go further on the legal fallout than the fine and the release. If there’s more to the Nurmagomedov situation, it hasn’t surfaced in the reporting yet.
Quick take
I’ve got a soft spot for fighters who get every reason to pull out and take the fight anyway, and Dvalishvili just set the bar somewhere absurd. Attacked, locked up, fined, face swollen, and the man still showed up and pinned a former title challenger in front of a paying crowd. The jail cell and the fine are the parts people will talk about at the bar this week, but the tape will show a guy who looked like he’d had a quiet week at the gym. Whoever’s handling the Nurmagomedov side of this story now has to explain why the guy they jumped is the one who got his hand raised on Saturday.
