UFC 306: Is Merab Dvalishvili playing games as he prepares for Sean O’Malley?

His old coach Ray Longo used to say Merab Dvalishvili was the easiest fighter in the world to coach, especially when it came time to help him construct a game plan for an upcoming fight.

“Because no matter who the opponent is,” Longo said, “Merab is just going to go out there and do Merab stuff.”

In other words, the easiest strategy to remember is the one that doesn’t change. And for pretty much his entire stay in the UFC, that’s been the book on the Georgian fighter with the flat nose and the mischievous sparkle in his eyes. He shows up, shoots for takedowns, wears people out in the clinch and on the mat, then gets his hand raised.

“It’s simple as that,” Dvalishvili told Yahoo Sports. “I’m going to do my thing, wherever I need to be.”

In the main event of UFC 306 on Saturday, Dvalishvili will get the biggest stage yet for his particular thing — and in more ways than one. Taking on UFC bantamweight champion Sean O’Malley, this will be Dvalishvili’s first crack at UFC gold after nearly seven years with the promotion. It will also be the headlining fight of the “Riyadh Season Noche UFC” event the UFC is reportedly spending many millions of dollars to put on as a special one-off affair at Sphere in Las Vegas.

For a challenger who had to win 10 fights in a row just to get here, the opportunities don’t come much bigger than this. That’s why it naturally took people by surprise when Dvalishvili suggested that this fight would be the one where he finally shows off his striking skills by standing and trading punches with the knockout artist O’Malley.

O’Malley, for his part, isn’t buying it.

“I feel like he’s so stupid that I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to strike with me,” O’Malley said. “But it’s like, you get hit hard in the chin a few times and you’re going to go to what you do. And he’s a wrestler. He's won 10 fights in a row — not by strength — but by wrestling, grappling, holding guys down, putting them up against the fence. So why would he try to change that going into a title fight?”

This is the double-edged sword of having a consistent and dependable style. On one hand, it does make things easier when you always know exactly what you’re going to do, regardless of what strengths your opponent might bring into the cage.

On the other, it also makes it easier for the other guy to prepare for you, since there aren’t many mysteries left in your game. Everyone knows exactly what Dvalishvili likes to do. It then just becomes a matter of stopping those constant takedown attempts and staying out of the spin cycle of Dvalishvili’s grappling game.

“I’m ready for anything, but that’s what I’m expecting,” O’Malley said. “I’m training for him to come out there and shoot a hundred thousand takedowns. That’s what we’re training. If he wants to come out there and strike, I’ve been doing that my entire career. So regardless, he gets knocked out whether he wants to wrestle or strike.”

For his part, Dvalishvili has lately taken to playing it coy about his plan for this fight. Maybe it’s a course correction after letting people too far behind the curtain, as when he posted a recent video to social media showing him receiving stitches on a cut suffered in training for this bout. Or maybe it’s that, simply by suggesting the possibility of a different approach for this fight, Dvalishvili has already accomplished his goal.

“I'm not worried about what Sean O’Malley will do,” Dvalishvili said. “… I’ve been training, sparring lots of tall guys, skinny guys, guys who hit hard, guys who [have] good striking, I've been seeing all. So all I have to do is just go do my thing, and even now I'm getting better and I'm going to show more [of] my boxing and striking skills.”

That, according to O’Malley, would be just about the dumbest thing the challenger could do in this particular fight.

“But I already told you how dumb he is,” O’Malley said. “It’s very true. So maybe he really is that dumb. We’ll see. I’m ready for anything.”