📝 The Takedown That's Defining MMA Grappling

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This past weekend Merab Dvalishvili reminded everyone why he is one of the best cage wrestlers we’ve ever see in MMA. We’re going to look at what he used to dominate Sean O’Malley before analyzing Kayla Harrison’s takedowns on Julianna Peña.

One more thing. Sorry for not sending anything out last week. My home got hit with something like a tornado the day before I had to fly across the country for a wedding. Not a good weekend for writing.

Now let’s get into it.

In the first week of October 2024 Sean O’Malley underwent hip surgery to repair a torn labrum. You might have heard of the labrum before. Injuring the ones in your shoulders is pretty common.

The labrum isn’t a particularly glamorous piece of the human experience. It’s padding. They sit in each shoulder and hip socket, and their combined placement provides padding so the top of the femur and humorous, your thigh and upper arm, can move freely in their respective joints. The padding that the labrum provides is partially responsible for why arms and legs can move so freely.

So, with O’Malley’s free moving frame hampered last year from the labrum that was torn in his hip, he wasn’t half the fighter many believed he could be. He certainly couldn’t spring into the kicks that stole the attention of the MMA world. And definitely not against Merab Dvalishvili in the fight just before O’Malley’s surgery.

Georges St-Pierre underwent knee surgery in 2011. Then again on his other knee in 2014. After his first knee surgery, GSP was hit 189 across 4 fights. That’s the exact same amount of times he was hit across the 8 fights immediately before his first surgery. The combination of surgery and age made GSP essentially twice as susceptible to damage.

Regardless of how necessary a surgery can be, its completion does not make for quick and easy combat sports returns. Especially not when you rush it like O’Malley said he wanted to do prior to the fight that took place this past weekend. Rushing a return when you need to rebuild your body while reworking your game so you can beat the man that ran over you in the first fight will never be a recipe success.

So it happened again. Worse. Merab ran O’Malley up and around the UFC cage for just under 15 minutes before submitting him. Let’s look at how he did it, what we can learn from the way Merab fights, and where O’Malley was having success.