Back in September, the main event of UFC 306: O’Malley vs Dvalishvili started strangely as ‘The Machine’ took a break from fighting to shout and point at the ‘Suga’ team.
Now, four months after that bantamweight title showdown, the UFC has released corner cam footage of the incident – with Sean O’Malley’s head coach lambasted by the wider MMA fanbase for his actions.
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesUFC 306 footage reveals Sean O’Malley’s coach distracting Merab DvalishviliOnly a few seconds into the opening round, chaos erupted after the Georgian began shouting at Suga’s corner, only for referee Herb Dean to pause the action to warn Merab Dvalishvili to focus on the fight at hand.
The whole situation was rather unusual, with both fans and the commentary booth confused as to what was going on – now, ahead of his first title defense at UFC 311, we’ve finally got our answer.
In corner cam footage shared by the UFC on YouTube, coach Tim Welch was caught yelling in a patronizing tone – “Meraby, you might need to be patient bud” – in a blatant attempt to distract the title challenger.
Referee Herb Dean was quick to call a halt to the fight, albeit warning Dvalishvili first for reacting, and second to teammate Aljamain Sterling for trying to get his attention – all while Tim Welch feigned that he’d been calling out to O’Malley the whole time.
Whilst Dvalishvili was widely criticized by many fans at the time, it seems that the consensus opinion on this new footage is that you can’t really blame the Georgian for his reaction.
“Bro, Merab gets hate, but he’s not wrong here,” reads the top comment on YouTube, with other responses reading to the tune of: “Now knowing the condescending attitude in which he said that, I don’t blame Merab for being p*****.”
“Coaches shouldn’t be behaving like this. Coach your fighter, don’t antagonize the opponent.”
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Merab Dvalishvili and Herb Dean react to the controversial calloutsSpeaking at the post-fight press conference a few hours later, Dvalishvili was understandably seething at both Tim Welch and the response from the veteran official.
“I was in there and I’m fighting, I’m a professional fighter so I am focused [on the fight], and that never happened to me [before], I never pay attention to other corner, but Tim’s voice was very familiar because he was doing the same thing to Aljamain.”
Back when Sean O’Malley first won the title, similar corner cam footage showed coach Welch telling Sterling ‘You’ve got to go’ – the ‘Funkmaster’ listened to that advice and got knocked out just a few seconds later.
As aptly noted by the bantamweight champion, “If you do that same thing in basketball or soccer, they will disqualify you, but I guess not here [in the UFC].”
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Herb Dean, speaking via Helen Yee Sports, explained that he had to call a stop to the fight to warn all parties because there is a rule about ‘excessive coaching’ that Welch was in violation of.
“It happens and we do address it and it’s been happening for as long as the sport’s been here, and even coaching the referee through the fighter, ‘Okay well Herb’s gonna stand you up because all he wants to do is hold you and he’s a boring b****-a** wrestler’, you know what I mean?”
Welch himself would later claim that he didn’t know about such a rule being in place at all.
“I sat down and was really calm and said, ‘You’ve got to be patient Merab’ and then he starts bucking around almost having a seizure… I didn’t know there was a rule that if you have a callout, it can’t be the other guy’s name.
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“I told Herb, I said some of our calls have Merab’s name in it and he’s like, ‘Nope, no’, I’m like, didn’t know that [but] I would love to see that f***** rule.”
Let’s hope that Khabib Nurmagomedov doesn’t pull any similar tricks in the corner of Umar Nurmagomedov at UFC 311 on January 18; although we’d bank that Dvalishvili might not engage with ‘The Eagle’ in quite the same manner as he did with Welch.
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