UFC champ Sean O'Malley: Getting under Merab Dvalishvili's skin is 'too easy'

Sean O'Malley thinks he’s in Merab Dvalishvili’s head.

O’Malley (17-1 MMA, 10-1 UFC) defends his bantamweight title against Dvalishvili (17-4 MMA, 10-2 UFC) in the UFC 306 main event Sept. 14 at Sphere in Las Vegas.

After calling O’Malley out for years, Dvalishvili will finally get his wish. However, O’Malley says it’s not a fight people have been clamoring for – until now.

“Merab’s been calling me out for a while,” O’Malley told Red Corner MMA. “After all the decision wins, he would call me out and it just never got any traction. No one ever was like, ‘Yo, you should have fought Merab.’ It’s like you can be so boring for so long that it becomes interesting. Like, you can beat so many people in boring ways that you become interesting.”

Dvalishvili took issue with some of the comments O’Malley’s head coach Tim Welch made, accusing him of being disrespectful. O’Malley thinks Dvalishvili’s focus is in the wrong place.

“It’s too easy (to get under his skin),” O’Malley said. “He needs to work on that. He is flustered. He’s worried about what Tim’s saying, he’s worried about my boy Schmitty in his DMs, he’s blocking a bunch of ‘Suga’ fans. I think he’s flustered.

“I think he knows he’s in for a tough night. Aljo (Sterling) probably smokes him in training and he just seen what I did to his boy. Be careful what you wish for. He says he’s been wanting this fight for a long time, but now that it’s real, I bet he’s like, ‘Ah sh*t.'”

For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 306.