The looks are new, but the principle is unchanging. In 1747 Captain John Godfrey called it mastery of “Time and Measure”. In Japanese swordsmanship it is called maai. Put simply it is the a fighter’s ability to control the distance between himself and an opponent, and to correctly anticipate and read that opponent’s attempts to close it. The man who can establish a buffer zone when he wants to be safe and collapse it when he wants to do damage is already set up to have a successful career in any sport that involves striking.

If you have sparred with anyone who has a better grasp of range and quicker feet than you, you will know the familiar hopeless feeling. There are ways to make a slick fighter stay in hitting distance longer than he should, or slow him down, but it is not an overstatement to say that without a boundary—perhaps in one of Joe Rogan’s hypothesized fights on a basketball court or an infinite plane—the master of Time and Measure is the master of the fight.

As expected, Israel Adesanya proved to be the most elusive ring general Paulo Costa had met, to the point that Costa was never able to get Adesanya to the fence and take advantage. One of the reasons that it is difficult to proclaim someone a good ring cutter is that you so seldom see direction changes along the fence and awareness of defensive ring positioning in MMA. This fan hoped for a battle of wits, with Adesanya wiling his way off the fence and Costa repeatedly trying to put him back to it, but after a couple of Adesanya escapes, Costa lost any chance he had in the fight.

Adesanya’s offence was the same as usual: it revolved around the jab and the low-low kick. He would adopt that posture that is now so familiar: right hand extended to check the opponent’s left, hips square, coiled to step in with a powerful jab or shortening the motion of the low kick. For all the razzle dazzle, Izzy’s basic two-parter is a large part of his success and is something that every fighter in the UFC should be using. The jab is the longest weapon in boxing: it leaves a fighter on balance and in control of where he wants or needs to go next, and it is quick to the target. The low-low kick punishes the opponent for trying to use the same weapon or any of his boxing. Adesanya got on the calf kick early and Costa’s long stance only served up more of a target. By round two Costa was standing taller and his head was almost stationary for Adesanya to crack at.

In the few moments that Costa got Adesanya near the fence early, Adesanya did a terrific job of deciding when to abandon his stance for mobility. Good ring generals flatten their stance to side skip—knowing that they will lose some hitting power and the ability to sway back at the waist—in order to direction change and escape sketchy exchanges near the ropes or fence.

When Joanna Jedrzejczyk fought Jessica Andrade, she played with the same dynamic. There is great value in holding your stance as long as possible if you plan to score counters as the opponent moves in on you, but you don’t want them to close, make contact, and then flatten out your stance against the fence. Typically a fighter should look to flatten his stance on his own terms. The L-step is a great way to do that: the fighter draws his lead foot back underneath him—creating a much larger space between himself and his opponent—before side stepping off.

Take a look at the example below, where Adesanya retracts his lead foot into his stance before skipping off sideways. Costa threw his right round kick because he thought he was close enough to make an exchange happen but soon learned he was well short. Consider Costa’s first UFC fight, where Garreth McClellan stood in the same stance and position as Adesanya but simply tried to circle along the fence in his stance and ran onto Costa’s kick every time.

Costa only braved a handful of body kicks in this fight, and a couple of them whizzed past Adesanya as he flattened his stance to skip along the fence. Flattening his stance also put Adesanya in an advantageous position to turn with the kick and catch it on his body.

In A Filthy Casual’s Guide to Israel Adesanya vs Paulo Costa we discussed Costa’s enthusiasm for right legged body kicking, and noted that the abundance of southpaws he has faced has allowed him to hinge his performances around that one weapon. Against a shuffling southpaw the right round kick is a terrific method of hurting, cutting the ring, and putting together combination work. This comes back to the open side / closed side principle. For a number of reasons it is better to kick to the open side when striking above the waist, and the closed side when attacking the lead leg.

When kicking to the body or head on the open side, a fighter is confronting their opponent’s rear arm. Good fighters will probably bring their lead arm across too if they plan to block a kick, but even at the highest levels of kickboxing and Muay Thai pounding kicks into the opponent’s forearm and wrist will quickly piss them off. There is also more chance of the hand being drawn out of position or sagging from fatigue, and where the opponent can get his head down behind his back and shoulder on the closed side, he can only duck towards the kick’s origin on the open side. Finally, it is just trickier to catch kicks on the open side. You either need to perform a scoop catch—reaching across with the opposite arm—or change position to slide and turn with the kick as you would on the closed side and as Adesanya was able to do at several points against Costa. But throwing naked body kicks to the closed side is an invitation to the opponent to catch your leg.

Costa has forged his path through the UFC middleweight division by throwing the right kick to the body as hard as he can, forcing the opponent out of their stance and into a cover up as he follows in to bombard them with punches. When Adesanya seemed close enough, Costa threw the right body kick and immediately had it caught. Where for everyone else Costa’s round kick had been the beginning of a downward spiral of combination hitting, Adesanya broke Costa off and threw his leg away, or dropped it and came back with counters while Costa was still on one leg. McClellan, Hendricks, Bamgbose, Romero and Hall had been forced to cover up as Costa came down from his kick—against Adesanya it was Costa forced into the shell.

It would be oversimplifying things to act as if a caught kick is the end of the world or that kicking into the open side is the sole means of success though. Hell, Jan Blachowicz managed to open up a gun shot wound in the side of Dominick Reyes with just three good kicks under his straying lead arm in the co-main event. If memory serves, Adesanya also stopped Bogdan Stoica with a body kick on the closed side as well. Kicking to the open side is a rule of thumb like circling past the lead foot of a southpaw: a savvy fighter learns more and more to exploit the benefits of doing exactly the opposite and varying his patterns throughout. When elite fighters meet, a caught kick should no longer be an automatic takedown, and in a striking context the action should not stop for the man on one leg while he waits for his opponent to punish him.

Watch any Muay Thai match—where catches are a dime a dozen—and you will see fighters punching off one leg, encouraging the opponent to catch and dropping in with an elbow on that same side, retracting and stop-kicking with the same leg, or even entering on a collar tie and beginning a clinch fight.

Costa was not without options, offensive and defensive, if he found that Adesanya was catching or evading his round kick, he just couldn’t go down the one path that he has always been able to in the UFC with little resistance. And that was the most disappointing part of this performance from Costa: he had nothing else lined up. This was not a case of his usual overarching strategy failing—he might well have undone Adesanya if he could corner him, dig to the body and put some power on him consistently—but he had only one tactic, nay move, he felt confident using to bring that occurrence about and Adesanya wasn’t having any of it. The double jab, push kicks, checking both hands and jumping in behind the lead knee—all options to try to close the distance and eat up some ground to get Adesanya closer to where Costa should want him, and none of them have a particularly demanding skill requirement.

That was the question coming into this fight: is Costa just a bully? This writer felt that the Yoel Romero fight pretty clearly showed that Costa is happy to get hit hard and keep going. What Adesanya did to break Costa’s will was to pick away at him and offer him nothing back. We saw Costa go through that familiar series of frustrated tells: goading Adesanya on, telling him to stand and fight, asking for more low kicks because he couldn’t actually do anything about them.

Obviously Israel Adesanya is one of a kind, but one of the big stumbling blocks Costa is going to face going forward is overcoming his horrible reaction to straight blows. This is something he shares with Jessica Andrade—another rough around the edges, forward-moving brawler. Both Costa and Andrade want to move in on their opponent, but attempt to deal with jabs and straights coming back by both reaching to parry the punch, and pulling their head back. It makes for a bizarre sight—trying to close the distance while throwing your noggin in the other direction. Adesanya and Jedrzejczyk both also used this habit to slap in high kicks on the same side they had their opponent reaching.

And this is what sets someone like Vicente Luque apart as the real deal: he can move forward and make himself harder to hit. In fact, the more you throw at Vicente Luque, the more you risk eating a counter combination. All of Costa’s defence involves him going backwards. Sometimes that is the neat lean-back left hook that he clubbed Romero with as the Cuban tried to come off the cage. More often that is leaning back and reaching for the blow, or simply backing up to the middle of the cage again. This habit was fully on show against Uriah Hall. Paulo Costa came into this title fight with an important part of his game missing, and hopefully this fight will highlight that to him and his coaches and allow them to produce a more complete offensive swarmer in the coming years.

So what is next for Israel Adesanya? Presumably it is Cannonier or Whittaker. Though both Adesanya and Darren Till seem keen to make that fight happen for whatever reason, and Jack Hermansson is within another good win of contention. And while Costa had almost no success, he did do well with low kicks: something we have often discussed being an important factor in taking on Adesanya. Of course, Costa landed two good ones, went for a third and Izzy pulled his leg away. But the lesson there isn’t "low kicks don’t work”, rather that Israel Adesanya is a complete striker who will adjust to what his opponent shows him. Just as Adesanya used the low kicks to take away Costa’s boxing, raise him up and make him an easier target, low kicks against Adesanya serve the purpose of taking away the pull backs and lean-aways. But Adesanya’s habits and the idea of Killing the King are for another day. Today is for celebrating a marvelous performance from one of the world’s best fighting minds.