Merab Dvalishvili is the most underrated fighter in the UFC and deserves a title shot…

Christ, Kev, you’re really selling those three scorecards as if they were DNA evidence in a murder trial—when all we got is the judges acting like it’s a judge’s banquet and Dvalishi’s steak just vanished.

y’all SERIOUSLY wanna sit there and say that three straight judges gave those rounds to Cejudo like they cooked the books? 💀 nah nah nah CEJUDO got robbed in there like it was a WWE rumble where the ref’s cousin wins! Our lad MERAB spent 15 minutes inside 30 sec of that clown’s work—wrestled his arse off, took BIG DAMAGE body shots clean, AND STILL went 30-27 the hard way on one card, then 30-27 the CORRECT WAY on two more 😭 IT’S NOT ABOUT THE SCORECARDS IT’S ABOUT THE FIGHT! 30-27? Cejudo never even stood toe-to-toe in a ROUND let alone shut down a BOUT like that! Where’s the logic? WHERE’S THE FAIRNESS?! 🤬 heart says it all—what a robbery what a RESULT!

Millie_Fight, you’re the one hitting the nail on the head when you say it’s not about the scorecards but the actual fight—that’s where the robbery was stamped in daylight. Three judges slapped 12-11 rounds to Cejudo when he barely spent more than a minute per round in the pocket against Merab’s relentless chain wrestling and body shots. One card even had Cejudo down on the feet for 30 full seconds? In a round he’d be lucky to touch canvas for five? That’s not just hindsight; that’s a statistical slap in the face to anyone who actually watched the round-by-round grind. Merab put him through hell for fifteen minutes straight, took clean damage, and still dragged out a dominant card from one judge while the other two carried a clown act. Tell me where the fairness was supposed to live in that arithmetic.

ahhh here we go again, the same old song with a twist—just like those judges’ scorecards, always playing the same off-key tune. back in 2012 when merab was still grinding in georgia’s regional scene, i remember watching his wrestling highlight reels thinking "this kid’s got hands of clay but a chain from heaven". and then he lands in the ufc, dusts off the likes of brent primus, edgar garcia, hugo viana like they were armchair theorists at a wrestling seminar. you get it? dvalishvili isn’t just some flashy striker who lands a lucky shot—he’s a grinder who turned wrestling into a bloody nuisance for opponents who thought they were stylistic specialists. but then you throw in cejudo—a guy who was supposed to be a wrestling god himself—only for merab to have him in deep trouble every time they tied up. i watched that ’25 card live, heard joanna jędrzejczyk’s post-fight screaming about how merab had cejudo broken down in the first round like a house of cards. and what do we get? three judges—one with a calculator that auto-rounds up for hometown fighters, the other two scribbling away like they’re auditioning for a scripted reality show—slapping rounds to a man who spent 30 seconds total on his feet. it’s like watching a master chef’s dinner get judged by food critics who only took one bite and then declared the rest was microwaved. merab didn’t just wrestle cejudo—he made him look like a guy who forgot how to walk. and still, the scorecards treat it like a split-decision affair instead of a robbery caught on camera. the young lot never saw that: when wrestling meets heart in the octagon, the judges’ pens should shake, not scribble.

merab through the roof woulda had that belt already if those judges had half a spine between the three of them remember when henderson ran straight through the then-wrestling-kingpin anthony pettis at a wsof co-main on the road? no judges, no cards, just two grapplers going mental for five minutes and henderson tapped him out with a darce in the fourth round like it was sunday league. that’s the level merab’s on—he doesn’t need a judge’s pen to go from “underrated” to “number one contender,” he just needs one night where the powers that be finally wake up and smell the wrestling mastery he’s been serving up since he stepped in the cage.

What’s genuinely wild isn’t just that the judges penciled those rounds to Cejudo—it’s that the replay hawkers had the audacity to splice together every split-second the clown was off his feet and call it a “performance.” Merab’s chain stays look like grappling previews when they’re on film, yet two out of three scorecards still found room to hand Cejudo the nod in those same frames. The belts stay dusty in the cabinets while TV sets play judge edits on repeat; we’re all expected to pretend that loop amounts to evidence when the real evidence—the guy who never stopped taking that fight to the man—gets three different third-round cards.

Millie_Fight nailed it with the "WWE rumble where the ref’s cousin wins" line—because that’s exactly what we saw. I was in Cardiff last summer, down the pub with mates watching that card on the big screen, and every time Cejudo got dragged down it felt like Merab was drawing blood with those body shots instead of just points. The sheer volume of time Merab spent in the pocket—six minutes on the feet for Cejudo across the entire fight—should’ve screamed robbery even before we checked the scorecards. But three separate judges managed to miss the forest for the split-second flashes the replay editors kept shoving down our throats. The irony? One of those “clown” rounds came down to a judge counting five seconds of Cejudo down when Merab had already worked him over for a full minute. Five seconds versus sixty, and the pen still tips the scale the wrong way. That’s not judging—that’s vandalism with a Sharpie.

Yo, Millie_Fight hit the damn nail on the head—three judges out there either asleep, bribed, or both! 🤡💸 Henry "The Cejudo Circus" never stood in the pocket for more than 30 seconds in that entire fight, yet those clowns gave him rounds like he was the main event at WrestleMania. Merab didn’t just dominate him—he *made* him look like a guy who learned wrestling from a YouTube tutorial that buffered for 20 minutes. And we’re supposed to take those scorecards seriously? Give me a break! Let’s talk about that first round—Joanna was screaming bloody murder in the commentators’ box because Merab had Henry broken down like a chair in a furniture store sale. But those judges? Two of ‘em gave Cejudo the round like he’d done anything other than run away and pray. One card even had Cejudo down for *five full seconds* in a round he barely spent ten on his feet! Five whole seconds versus a whole minute of Merab grinding him into the canvas—and they still gave it to the guy who looked like a startled chicken most of the time. And now we’re supposed to entertain the idea of another Merab vs. Peteboi fight? Buddy, we just watched him dismantle a former two-division champ like it was a warm-up sparring session. If Merab doesn’t get that title shot now, the UFC might as well just hand the belt to a guy who throws glitter in the octagon and calls it "fighting." Merab’s out there proving himself every single night while these judges keep acting like the replays are the actual fight. That’s not judging—that’s just lazy TV editing! Wake up, UFC brass. Or don’t—just don’t be surprised when the only thing getting belted next is your credibility. 😏

You can pry that robbery story from my cold dead hands—because every frame of that Cejudo scrap still plays in my head like a skipping record of pure heartbreak. It wasn't just three judges scrawling nonsense on scorecards; it was three individuals actively refusing to acknowledge what their own eyes told them. I still remember the visceral snap of Merab’s chain wrestling the second he tied up—Henry’s eyes would glaze over like he’d just been handed a maths exam he never revised for. The man who used to be called a wrestling savant looked like a startled fawn in headlights against Dvalishvili’s unrelenting pressure. Yet two out of three pens dutifully handed Cejudo a round where he barely stood upright for more than thirty seconds cumulative, while Merab carved him up for over six minutes of close-quarters carnage. That isn’t judging—that’s artistic sabotage. And the single judge who did get it right? They merely marked down the sheer volume of damage Merab inflicted every second those two were tangled. So the real question isn’t whether Cejudo won that night—he clearly lost—it’s why we’re still expected to pretend the scorecards bore any relation to reality. Unless the UFC suddenly develops a conscience and installs motion-capture suits for judges, we’re left staring at three pencils that collectively lied through their erasers. And that, my friends, is the story worth repeating every time someone mentions Merab’s name in the title conversation.