{"id":337898,"date":"2025-12-09T20:42:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T20:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/337898\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T20:42:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T20:42:07","slug":"close-fight-merabs-coach-thought-we-were-winning-at-ufc-323","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/337898\/","title":{"rendered":"Close fight? Merab\u2019s coach \u2018thought we were winning\u2019 at UFC 323"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI thought we were winning and controlling and I thought we were pressing and doing what we needed to do,\u201d coach John Wood told MMA Fighting<\/a>. \u201cPetr definitely had the bigger moments and I think that shifted [the fight] and you just don\u2019t know. There\u2019s times where judges they don\u2019t care, you don\u2019t get that, you don\u2019t see that. But he had the bigger moments in those things and that really did account in the damage and the blood, those were the things that added up and took over. That was my bad for not having a little bit more control on the optics there of what we were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut again, a fight\u2019s a fight,\u201d Wood continued. \u201cYou just sometimes, it doesn\u2019t go the way you want it to go. It sucks. It\u2019s like waking up from a nightmare. This doesn\u2019t go away. I thought we had the right things going on in this camp and it was a quick camp and it was a hard camp. There\u2019s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes. But it was Petr\u2019s night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the was not enough urgency in the corner of Dvalishvili.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will say in real time, I thought it was possibly us winning the first three rounds even though I knew that they were close, I just thought we edged it out,\u201d teammate and former bantamweight champion, Aljamain Sterling, said on YouTube<\/a>. \u201cEspecially the fourth round. I knew Yan won that round, and then obviously as the fight\u2019s going, Round 5, we knew [Yan] was starting to get the better of that round, so I figured it would be 3-2 us. But it ended up being 4-1 and 3-2 for Yan, which 3-2 I\u2019m not super mad about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 4-1 was kind of like, it always makes me wonder what the hell am I watching if I had it 3-2? I don\u2019t know,\u201d Sterling added. \u201cClose fight. Yan, he did great, can\u2019t really say anything about it. I do think Merab didn\u2019t quite look himself, but I want to make sure I\u2019m giving respect and props to Yan for the things that he also did well. So it could have been a little bit of both. A little bit of a bad night and also one guy was just on another level that night.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more UFC 323 results and fallout click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI thought we were winning and controlling and I thought we were pressing and doing what we needed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337899,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,40762,785,85,174978,1396,6656],"class_list":{"0":"post-337898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-ufc-mma-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc-323","15":"tag-ufc-news","16":"tag-ufc-results"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}