Tim Welch thinks Sean O'Malley’s knockout of Aljamain Sterling put the division on notice – especially Merab Dvalishvili.
O’Malley (17-1 MMA, 9-1 UFC) dropped and stopped Dvalishvili’s teammate Sterling in Round 2 to claim the bantamweight title in this past Saturday’s UFC 292 headliner at TD Garden in Boston.
The general notion was that O’Malley was not going to be able to handle Sterling’s wrestling, but “The Sugar Show” fended off Sterling’s lone two takedown attempts. Welch thinks O’Malley’s performance definitely got the attention of top contender Dvalishvili (16-4 MMA, 9-2 UFC), who attempted a record 49 takedowns in his past outing against Petr Yan.
“I think if you’ve got a real special striker, like someone like (Israel Adesanya) or (Alexander Volkanovski) or these guys, they see Sean and they’re like, ‘Wow, he is a problem,'” Welch told Submission Radio. “But then you have stupid people like Henry Cejudo that think they’re just going to go in there and kick his legs and they’re going to take him down easy, and that’s all you’ve got to do is just kick his legs and pressure him.
“And then, I think Merab, too – I think that might have put a little fear in Merab because Merab makes a lot of those mistakes, too. Yes, he’s got a scary, scary gas tank. He’s going to come forward the whole time. But he reaches and he does a lot of bad stuff fundamentally, too. If that fight happens eventually, he’ll probably knock Merab out, too. But I think to actual skilled fighters that can see it, they see how dangerous he is.”
Dvalishvili was outraged at Marc Goddard’s stoppage of O’Malley vs. Sterling (23-4 MMA, 15-4 UFC), taking aim at the renowned referee. But Welch says Goddard protected Sterling from inevitable extra damage.
“I saw all the reactions, but I didn’t see the reaction from Aljo,” Welch said. “I don’t know if he said it was stopped early, but he didn’t seem to be complaining at all when that ref pulled him off Sean. He seemed to be like, f*ck, thank God that’s over. And you saw what happened to Thomas Almeida.
“Thomas Almeida took some serious brain damage – got a lot of swelling in his brain, and he’s probably got CTE from that fight. If they would have kept it going, who knows – he could have got knocked out cold worse than (against) Marlon Moraes, and that would have been a bad, bad night. It was a good job by the ref, in my opinion.”
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 292.
