The sweeps of Merab Dvalishvili and other grappling shenanigans

🇬🇪 A deep look at the Georgian grappler for the TFL family

I feel like we are in the era of volume fighters. Belal Muhammad and Dricus Du Plessis have risen to the top, putting on an insane pace that nobody can keep up with. Of course, there’s old names like Nate and Nick Diaz as well as Max Holloway that have been at this point. But these types of fighters have risen to the top in recent years. One such fighter is Merab Dvalishvili.

Today, I want to look at a specific aspect of Dvalishvili’s game: his foot sweeps. My goal is to get a better understanding of how the Georgian bantamweight approaches takedowns in the clinch that can put do Olympic gold medalists (but not Jose Aldo).

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Merab Dvalishvili and the foot sweep

Merab Dvalishvili loves the foot sweep. With a background in judo, sambo, and his native folkstyle of chidaoba, Dvalishvili loves to trip from the clinch. With all three of these wrestling styles (yes, judo is wrestling) having jackets, Dvalishvili has adjusted his game to a no-gi approach.

Dvalishvili loves to punish over extensions by attacking the lead leg off a bit punch. (1) Cejudo throws the left cross and (2) Dvalishvili picks up the leg. He tries to pull Cejudo down to the floor and then (3) comes up as Cejudo keeps his balance. Adjusting on the fly, (4) Dvalishvili picks his head up and positions his left hand to push Cejudo and (5) shifting his right leg behind Cejudo’s and completes the sweep.

Dvalishvili consistently gets his opponents standing on one leg by holding on to the leg and sweeping out the last standing leg so he can get a takedown. This will be the common theme for the entire article.

Another attack from Dvalishvili is the positioning of his angle to complete at takedown. We, once again, see (1) Dvalishvili in on a single against Cejudo and (2) trying to pull him to the mat. Not successful, Dvalishvili will (3) step around the side of Cejudo as he grabs the overhook. (4) With the overhook secured by Cejudo, Dvalishvili steps through behind Cejudo’s right leg and (5) pulls him over to the ground.

This worked because Cejudo was expecting Dvalishvili to step through and continue chasing the single leg takedown. That mental misdirection helped Merab Dvalishvili stick to Cejudo and step across to the back of Cejudo’s leg and pull him over the leg.

An area of improvement for Dvalishvili would be to add the inside leg trip which, coincidentally, was mastered by Henry Cejudo. It’s not often that Dvalishvili is chest to chest with an opponent for the inside trip, as seen in the animation above, but he can work his way there with the specific intention of this inside trip.