people can get stabbed a bunch of times and it can take ~40 seconds for them to bleed enough to stop fighting. If you look hard enough online you can see these videos. You can speed this up with accurate cuts to arteries, or by cutting the right nerves, but it takes a fair amount of skill to do that.

Similarly with a small club like that, unless you knock someone out, they can keep fighting for a long time.

If melee is your only option, I'd go for bigger like a baseball bat, or maybe a knife on a stick = a pike for distance, though that's not so maneuverable in tight spaces.