The Deceptively Deft Outfighting of

Alexander Volkanovski

In previous discussions of Alexander Volkanovski at Fightland and Vice Sports, we tended to focus on his cage work. I referred to his style as “kickboxing along the fence” because most of his fights involved him walking the opponent to the cage before he even began work. There was a lot of jab-and-duck to right hands along the fence and it would be easy to get the impression that Volkanovski fought best as a bully. Yet in his last two fights—against Chad Mendes and Jose Aldo—Volkanovski has shown more work at range and out in the centre of the cage, and surprised a great many fans and pundits with his long range weapons.

To quickly recap the familiar Volkanovski formula, it is to get the opponent’s back foot against the cage and then alternate between counter striking off the cage—one of the most effective striking strategies in MMA right now—and moving in for short takedowns. Despite the UFC playing up his rugby background at every opportunity, very little of Volkanovski’s cage wrestling is done by shooting short doubles or tackling people. Instead Volkanovski will almost always strike into the clinch and push his opponent to the cage in the over under or double unders. From there the basic outside trip is his favourite weapon.

One of the key ways in which Volkanovski differentiates himself from the blur of cage wrestlers is that he will strike effectively off the fence. You will see him use a head post, free his arms and spin for the Jon Jones back elbow—he knocked down Hirota in this way. You will also see him use a stepping right hook on the break if the opponent circles out—again, he knocked down Hirota with this. But by disengaging from an outside trip he is struggling on, Volkanovski can get to work with hard strikes while his opponent is recovering their base.

In the mold of several other cage wrestlers, Volkanovski does not mind being inside the closed guard—in fact it gives him more chance of keeping the opponent down. Jeremy Kennedy had a nightmare getting stuck underneath Volkanovski along the fence, getting dragged back down and beaten up every time he wall walked, but he had a glimmer of success when he allowed Volkanovski to pass to half guard and essentially kicked him into the pass to try and sneak out the back door with the underhook.

The entries to the clinch are often a jab-and-dip, or a booming right hand and weave into the clinch: the old Fedor Emelianenko Special. Poor old Darren Elkins was smacked silly with this one several times just to get up and carry on in the way that only he does.

Outfighting for the Stockier Gentleman

But with his last two performances Volkanovski has given us a chance to talk about something new. He could have run into Jose Aldo and Chad Mendes—two fighters he would never be able to ragdoll like his previous UFC opponents—and fallen short trying to do the same things. Instead, Volkanovski put on thoughtful outfighting showings against both. One of the odd things about Volkanovski is that he is almost always the shorter fighter and yet he does a lot of his work with the traditional distance fighting weapons: the jab and the lead leg inside low kick. In fact large portions of the Jose Aldo and Chad Mendes fights were just Volkanovski showing one and then the other, with a dozen feints mixed in there and not a single right hand in sight.

In combat sports the emphasis is almost always placed upon fighting to your god-given strengths. Most fight fans can look you up and down and tell you that if you are short and stocky you want to get to the inside, and if you are tall and rangey you want to keep the fight at distance and deny the opponent that inside fight. For you to hang about trying to outjab someone with six inches of reach on you or for Stefan Struve to run in swinging right uppercuts is obviously daft. But you often see fighters get trapped in what they “should” be doing and ignoring everything else.

As always, Roberto Duran is a beautiful example of what a fighter can be—he liked inside fighting and had a reputation for it, but almost everyone he fought was surprised by the quality jab he employed to get there. Duran jabbed comfortably with men who dwarfed him like Iran Barkley. Ultimately, even if you have a sawn off build your jab and inside low kick are still your long range weapons regardless of the height and reach of your opponent. When moving in you will be able to score them before you can score your inside blows.

Against his best opponents, Volkanovski has diligently laid the foundations with his long range weapons first. He took the feinting aspects of Max Holloway’s performances against Jose Aldo and paired them with his low kick. The inside low kick isn’t held in much regard in MMA at the present moment because the calf kick is in vogue and is a more damaging blow and more difficult to check, but they are completely different kicks and present different opportunities and difficulties. Some fighters even ignore the inside low kick altogether and Volkanovski can do some decent accumulative damage. You need only revisit our study on Weili Zhang ahead of her straw weight title shot to see the inside low kick on show as an a tricky-to-answer point scorer in MMA.

If the opponent can be relied upon to pick his leg up, or you can land the kick hard enough to pick it up for him, the inside low kick is a brilliant entry. You will see fighters take their opponent’s leg clean off the floor with a calf kick and still struggle to get in due to the range of the attack and the use of the rear leg in executing it. Dan Henderson routinely used the inside low kick and almost nothing else to get in on much younger, faster opponents even once his body was partly fossilized. In the later stages of the Chad Mendes fight—when Mendes’ gas tank was running low once again—Volkanovski was able to use the inside low kick to get in with combinations.

For the early part of the fight the inside low kick, and Volkanovski’s lead leg kicking game as a whole, is about drawing reactions. Against most of his opponents Volkanosvki will quickly begin pressuring them to the fence and throwing out the lead leg kicks just to get them to come back at him. Then he will drop away and crack them with a right hand counter across the top. Darren Elkins was an easy mark for this in their fight.

And the switch step off the inside low kick is another classic that you will see fairly often from men like Jonathan Haggerty in Muay Thai. The inside low kick lands and as it is brought back the fighter either switch steps into a southpaw stance or puts his leg all the way behind him if the opponent is offering a lot of pressure.

This stance switch left straight off the low kick was a consistent feature in the Aldo bout and in fact several of the key clinches were entered in this way. Volkanovski also finds great use for the stiff left straight that Sergei Kovalev loves so much—squaring the body as if to throw the right hand before unwinding it into something more than a jab. Volkanovski will often throw this out of the level change—as Julio Cesar Chavez used to do, most famously against Roger Mayweather. Another application of the technique is to throw the right low kick, square up as the foot is retracted back to the stance, and surge forward with the Kovalev jab.

While we will discuss the specifics of the match up between Max Holloway and Alexander Volkanovski on the Fights Gone By podcast, it was worth pointing out some of the tricks that Volkanovski uses to win long range exchanges and to bridge the gap on his own terms. Volkanovski’s stocky build and noted power mask a considerably smarter fighter. He is active, but doesn’t waste strikes. He uses the fence to secure takedowns and win rounds, but he keeps the opponent along it for most of the round with his footwork alone. There is very little reaching or shooting for long takedowns from Volkanovski, and little swinging big without setting the table first. That, more than anything else, is what makes him a compelling match up for the featherweight king.