SOLVED: Petr Yan Ends the Merab Trilogy With the Belt Still Around His Waist
“A shot is not a takedown, and on Saturday night Yan's defense turned the division's most feared weapon into cardio theatre.”
Three fights, fifteen rounds, one question — can anyone solve Merab Dvalishvili? In Abu Dhabi the champion answered it for the final time: 48-47 on every card, and the first successful title defense of his career.
Three fights. Fifteen rounds. One question that followed Petr Yan for three years — can anyone solve Merab Dvalishvili? In Abu Dhabi, the champion answered it for the final time: 48-47 on all three cards, the trilogy closed 2-1, and the first successful title defense of Yan's career.
The number that tells the whole fight is five. Five completed takedowns for Merab Dvalishvili — the most relentless wrestler the bantamweight division has ever seen — and the distribution matters more than the total. One came in the first round. Four came in the second. In rounds three, four and five, with the fight and the belt on the line, the Machine completed none.
He never stopped shooting. That is the thing about Merab — there is no quit in the attempts, no round where the pressure takes a breather. Shot after shot, chain after chain, for twenty-five minutes. But a shot is not a takedown, and on Saturday night at Etihad Arena, Petr Yan's defense turned the division's most feared weapon into cardio theatre. The attempts piled up. The completions stopped coming after the second round. And while Merab wrestled the air, Yan did what he has done since their second meeting: he boxed, he dug to the body, and he banked the championship rounds.
A rivalry in three acts
To understand what Yan solved, you have to go back to March 2023, when the first fight looked like a changing of the guard. Dvalishvili beat Yan by unanimous decision in Las Vegas with one of the great wrestling performances in division history — eleven takedowns, a pace that never dipped, a shutout built on volume and will. Yan, the former champion, looked like a man whose era had been outworked.
The rematch, at UFC 323 last December, was the reversal. Yan reclaimed the title by unanimous decision — 49-46, 49-46 and 48-47 — in a performance built on exactly the things that failed him the first time: takedown defense that held, counter boxing that punished every entry, and a sustained investment in body work that slowed the Machine's engine as the fight wore on. He landed 139 significant strikes that night. The series was level, and the rubber match was inevitable.
Saturday's trilogy fight — only the second trilogy in bantamweight history — carried stakes in every direction. Yan, across two separate reigns as champion, had still never successfully defended the belt. Merab, with a win, would have tied T.J. Dillashaw's record of five title-fight victories in the division. The experts leaned toward the challenger: Georges St-Pierre picked Dvalishvili to find a way, Laura Sanko picked him "just by a hair," both expecting the adjustments to beat the adjustments.
Yan's own read was simpler. "I've figured him out," he said during fight week. For five rounds on Saturday, he proved it.
The night the wall held
The first two rounds were the old fight trying to happen. Merab got his takedown in the first, then four more in the second — his best stretch of the night. It was 2023's script: pressure, mat returns, volume, and it bought him two rounds on every card.
Then the fight turned into 2025's script, and it never turned back.
From the third round on, Yan's takedown defense was absolute. Every entry met a sprawl, an underhook, a frame — and a bill. The body work from the rematch was there again, the quiet investment that does not show up in a single exchange but shows up in the fifth round, when the shots come a half-step slower and the champion is still bouncing, still countering, still landing the cleaner work. The rounds Merab had filled with takedowns gave way to rounds without a single completion. The championship rounds — the ones that separate champions from challengers — went to the man wearing the belt.
When the scores were read, there was no controversy to manufacture: 48-47, three times. Close enough to honor what Merab brought — two rounds of the old nightmare — and clear enough to close the argument. Yan took the trilogy, kept the belt, and finally, in his second reign, defended it.
What it settles, and what it starts
A trilogy is supposed to answer a question, and this one did. The 2023 fight was not a fluke and neither was the rematch: Merab Dvalishvili's pace is a genuine all-time weapon, and Petr Yan is the one bantamweight alive who has built the complete answer to it — defense that does not crack, boxing that punishes ambition, and a gas tank that spends five rounds proving the point. Two of the three meetings went to the Russian, including both with gold on the line.
For Merab, the road back is real but steep. His run — the belt taken from Sean O'Malley, then defended against Umar Nurmagomedov, O'Malley again and Cory Sandhagen through a relentless 2025 — was one of the great activity runs the division has seen, and two losses to the same champion do not erase it. But at 2-1 down in the rivalry, with the belt on the other man's waist, a fourth fight is not a conversation anyone will have soon. He will have to win his way back to a man he has now failed to solve twice in a row.
For Yan, the conversation changes. The knock on his career was never skill — it was completion. Belts won and never defended. That line is gone now. He is a two-time champion with a defense, the winner of a historic trilogy, and the owner of the deepest puzzle in the division, solved twice. The bantamweight line forms behind him — and every man in it has just watched fifteen rounds of film on what it takes to beat Merab Dvalishvili, taught by the only professor the subject has.
Class dismissed. The trilogy is over. Petr Yan is still the champion.
