Owen Jones Gets His Revenge, Calls Out Cole Abate

There's a particular kind of Jiu Jitsu win that lands harder than the scorecard suggests, and Owen Jones just collected one. At ONE Fight Night 44 the 21-year-old Brit beat Fabricio Andrey by split decision — the same Andrey who had handed Jones a loss three years earlier, back when Jones was an 18-year-old still figuring out where he fit on the world stage. The result pushed his pro record to 17-6. More importantly for anyone watching, it closed a loop.

"Nothing better than some revenge, you know? He beat me three years ago when I was like an 18-year-old," Jones told BJJEE afterward, before adding that the point was less about payback and more about proof — that he'd "leveled up a lot since then." Watch the moment on Instagram and the gap is visible: Jones pushing the pace on the feet, Andrey walking backward, the kind of forward pressure you don't have at eighteen.

The rematch is the real measuring stick

For the average BJJ practitioner, the headline here isn't the call-out — it's the rematch itself. We tend to treat losses as verdicts. Someone catches us in a triangle, taps us with a heel hook we never saw, dominates a competition match, and a quiet little file gets created in our heads: that person is better than me. It calcifies. We start avoiding the round.

Jones is modeling the opposite. He took the loss at eighteen, went back to the lab, and three years later ran it back against the same man — and this time dictated the exchanges. That's the most useful frame any of us can borrow from the pros. The person who tapped you in March is not a fixed wall; they're a snapshot of where you both were that day. Train the holes, ask for the rematch, and let the second data point tell you what the first one couldn't.

It's also worth noting how he won. Jones described pushing the pace standing, threatening a tight inside heel hook on the ground where he "popped his foot a few times," and — tellingly — staying calm when Andrey threatened back with a kimura-to-armbar sequence. "I didn't really panic," he said. "I immediately defended it, cleared the elbow, and then got back straight on the attack." That composure under a real attack is the thing that separates a leveled-up grappler from a younger version of himself. The submissions are learnable; the refusal to panic is earned.

"A good clash of styles"

Then came the part that got the headlines. Jones, feeling he'd earned a marquee matchup, called out fellow rising star Cole Abate of Art of Jiu Jitsu — same age, same featherweight neighborhood, two prospects who came up through the ranks at the same time and somehow never crossed paths.

"Me and Cole are the same age, we kind of came through the ranks, we never managed to fight, but we were in the same division. I think it'd be a good clash of styles," Jones said, before tossing in the obligatory bit of trash talk about wanting to prove Abate is overrated.

Strip away the needle and there's something genuinely good for the sport in that phrase: a clash of styles. Professional submission grappling under ONE Championship has quietly become one of the best advertisements Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has. Real stakes, real money, athletes in their physical prime, and matchups built on contrasting games rather than the same flowchart. A Jones–Abate fight pits two distinct young approaches against each other — exactly the kind of bout that pulls casual fans into watching high-level no-gi and seeing the depth underneath it.

Why this matters for the rest of us

You're not competing at ONE this weekend. But the throughline is the same on every mat. Styles clashing is where you learn — the pressure passer who frustrates the open-guard player, the leg-locker who forces the old-school passer to finally learn to retain. The grapplers who improve fastest are the ones who seek out the bad matchup instead of dodging it, the same way Jones sought out the man who'd beaten him.

So borrow the lesson, not the bravado. Find the round that exposes you. Lose it on purpose, on repeat, until it isn't a loss anymore. That's how an eighteen-year-old becomes a twenty-one-year-old calling his own shots — and it's how the rest of us get a little less catchable, one honest, uncomfortable roll at a time.

See you on the mats.

Original report via BJJEE.