Petr Yan recaptured the bantamweight title by defeating longtime rival Merab Dvalishvili atop the UFC 323 pay-per-view (PPV) event last weekend in Las Vegas, a five-round performance that saw “No Mercy” out-strike and out-wrestle “The Machine.”
Was it a close fight?
Dvalishvili’s corner expected a different outcome by the time the championship headliner went to the judges’ scorecards. In the end, Yan swept all three cards by the scores of 49-46 (Mike Bell), 48-47 (Derek Cleary), and 49-46 (Eric Colon).
“I thought we were winning and controlling and I thought we were pressing and doing what we needed to do,” coach John Wood told MMA Fighting. “Petr definitely had the bigger moments and I think that shifted [the fight] and you just don’t know. There’s times where judges they don’t care, you don’t get that, you don’t 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.”
“But again, a fight’s a fight,” Wood continued. “You just sometimes, it doesn’t go the way you want it to go. It sucks. It’s like waking up from a nightmare. This doesn’t 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’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes. But it was Petr’s night.”
Perhaps the was not enough urgency in the corner of Dvalishvili.
“I 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,” teammate and former bantamweight champion, Aljamain Sterling, said on YouTube. “Especially the fourth round. I knew Yan won that round, and then obviously as the fight’s 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’m not super mad about.”
“The 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’t know,” Sterling added. “Close fight. Yan, he did great, can’t really say anything about it. I do think Merab didn’t quite look himself, but I want to make sure I’m 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.”
With the score tied one apiece, there’s a very good chance Yan and Dvalishvili will settle their score once and for all at some point in 2026. Especially since “No Mercy” is “avoiding” this former bantamweight champion.
For more UFC 323 results and fallout click here.
