Gaethje vs Poirier II

The first adjustment Justin Gaethje and his team made was to take the inside low kick and throw it in the slop bucket. It was the inside low kick that got him skewered with counter lefts from Poirier last time, this time he made the choice to focus on the outside low kick instead. This meant that Gaethje couldn’t hammer in kicks with his right leg—his weapon of choice—but instead had to perform a step up kick with his left leg. But the choice of target outweighed the loss of power because each time Gaethje landed on Poirier’s longer, more bladed stance, Poirier’s lead leg would either buckle in at the knee or leave the floor altogether, turning him around. Both outcomes resulted in Poirier being unable to follow up.  

Fig. 1

Having removed his greatest unforced error from the first fight, Gaethje was able to get to work on disarming Poirier’s best offensive tool from that meeting: the jab. This was done through hand fighting and correct use of distance. When Gaethje was charging forward and covering up in the first bout, Poirier could hammer the jab against Gaethje’s guard to force cover ups, or to counter when Gaethje opened up to swing. With Gaethje fighting more upright and controlling the distance, Poirier had to jab his way to Gaethje. When Poirier did step in with his jab, Gaethje would attempt to counter across the top with a left hook.

Fig. 2

Or he would hand fight with Poirier and pitch a fast right straight down the centre. One of the best connections of round one was scored in this way.

This brings us to the role of the right straight in this match up. Gaethje’s best punches are his left hook, his right uppercut, and a short right hook that is especially difficult to land on decent strikers. Straight hitting has never been his forte. In this fight he was able to use the right straight in place of the jab to initiate and had good success with a “cross-and-dip” tactic.

Figure 3 shows a good example. Gaethje lances Poirier with a long right straight (b), before dropping down as the two men close (c). As Poirier is reaching down to grab Gaethje’s head or line up a counter, Gaethje comes up with the left hook (d). This serves the same role as the jab-and-dip: it closes the distance while also anticipating the opponent who is going to try to punch you while you’re stepping in. The reason to cross and dip is because the lead hands are so often in the way of each other in a southpaw vs orthodox match up.

Fig. 3

With Gaethje and Poirier you are going to get heaps of “crafty”, but you are not always going to get “pretty” or “clean”. While Figure 3 showed Gaethje dipping and remaining in his stance, he more commonly threw the right straight and dipped as he stepped—or fell—through to southpaw.

Fig. 4

Gaethje even made use of the Poirier Shift at several points in the bout. Doubling his right hand as he stepped through to southpaw and cracked Poirier with a southpaw left overhand.

Figure 5 and Figure 6 both show Gaethje shooting a right straight, stepping through to throw a southpaw right hook, and following with a southpaw left.

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

It was an incredibly positive start for Gaethje. He was well on his way to expunging the memory of the first fight, but Poirier began to make reads and adaptations of his own.

Justin Gaethje might be the biggest hitter going at lightweight, but for a 155 pound man to generate the kind of force that Gaethje does, he must throw his weight into the blow. Even the short, flicking counter hooks he was trying to catch Poirier with threw Gaethje onto the mat when he missed. So Poirier hit on the idea of feinting and double jabbing midway through the first round and it clearly made Gaethje’s job of countering a good deal harder.

Figure 7 shows Poirer advancing on Gaethje. He pokes out a slow, probing jab that is clearly short of the mark (b). As he retracts the jabbing hand, Poirier stabs his lead foot in and drops his level slightly as if to enter for real (c) but pulls up short. Gaethje whips in the counter left hook which misses and throws him off balance (d), (e).

Fig. 7

Figure 8 shows an even more severe example. Poirier pokes out two non-threatening jabs ahead of him, keeping his body and head out of reach (a) - (d). When he changes up rhythm and stabs his lead foot in as if to attack for real (e), Gaethje whiffs a left hook with such force that it sends him onto all fours (g).

Fig. 8

The other counter that Gaethje looked for was the right hand through the open side. He went to this when he didn’t have enough space to fall back and throw the left hook, or when he had already whiffed a left hook and shown his intentions to Poirier. In the first fight, Gaethje’s only successful counter had been a slip to the open side and a return with that short right hook.

Fig. 9

Figure 10 shows a nice example of Poirier pressuring Gaethje to the fence (a), attacking with a left straight to the body (c), and Gaethje drifting off to his right and nailing Poirier with an open side counter (d). It is worth noting that Poirier closes the door with his right hook and this puts him back into his shoulder roll, protecting him from the left hook that Gaethje throws immediately after the open side counter (e), (f).

Fig. 10

Figure 11 shows how Poirier was able to draw and punish this dip to the open side. Poirier flicks a jab out—again, short of an real target—and Gaethje swats at it. The two men reset and Poirier uses a quick shuffle step to jab in. Reading Gaethje’s dip to the open side, Poirier hammers him with a left straight in his new position. Poirier scored this shot twice in the opening round.

Fig. 11

Also of note is the way that Poirier moves his feet. He contracts his stance and draws his rear foot up underneath him as he jabs. This is the galloping step that Jose ‘Mantequilla’ Napoles used to cover distance, which we examined at length in the Advanced Striking study on the Cuban great.

Fig. 12

Poirier was also able to modify his shift to exploit this open side counter. This was the counter that he was preparing for in his three fights with Conor McGregor after all. You will recall that in the second McGregor fight, Poirier added a dip after his left straight, and shifted through to attempt a takedown or counter punch after McGregor’s left hand had shot through and missed him. Figure 13 shows Poirier springing the same trap on Gaethje. He pokes his left straight out ahead of him and Gaethje side steps to the open side (b). As Gaethje swings in his right, Poirier ducks underneath (c) while shifting into an orthodox stance. Poirier comes up with his overhand right and turns Gaethje’s head around (d), (e).

Fig. 13

At the beginning of the second round, it seemed that Poirier had adjusted to a more technical fight and he had Gaethje swinging himself out of position in the early moments of the round. Moments later the high kick connected and all that working out amounted to naught.

The kicking game up to that point had been a largely Poirier led affair. Gaethje demonstrated the outside low kick in the first couple of minutes but soon forgot about it. Poirier, meanwhile, opened with a front snap kick to the body—Figure 14—and stuck it in repeatedly through the first round.

Fig. 14

Figure 15 shows a selection of Gaethje’s reactions to the body kicks. He showed a rather extreme tendency to duck himself down into the kicks when Poirier threw them. Poirier spotted this and attempted to sneak a knee up the inside in the first round, which Gaethje managed to avoid. But when Poirier returned to the corner they were encouraging him to attempt more of the same.

Fig. 15

The finish has been examined to death. It was a right straight to right high kick. The same side combination that is currently having a bit of a moment in MMA. This writer’s personal theory is that an increase in the confidence of fighters in their boxing has lead to this set up gaining more potency. Because fighters are more comfortable moving their heads and trying to stay in range to score counters, they can be baited into slipping or parrying themselves into sneaky high kicks.

It is a constant theme when I write about Poirier that the comfort he gained under fire turned him from a decent featherweight into a great lightweight. By the second round, Poirier was pressuring Gaethje back towards the fence, poking out jabs that fell just short and pressing in behind them. He wanted reactions from Gaethje that he could read, or a refusal to react which he could then exploit with a change of speed. Figure 16 shows the finish.

Poirier extends the jab at Gaethje’s guard (b), steps his back foot up (c), and as Gaethje throws back, he leans off line and parries the shot (d). Poirier is in great position to counter punch if Gaethje throws the cross and dips, or tries to shift through. Several exchanges in the first round—including the great final exchange of the round—played out like this. It was just the case that Poirier was in no position to block a powerful high kick.

Fig. 16

There are lots of lessons to be learned from this match about feinting and distancing and pre-emptive defences leading into counter-counter punching. None of those lessons are as simple as “shoulda blocked the kick” though. Poirier’s adjustments were top tier and yet they amounted to nothing. Gaethje’s corrections from the first fight were brilliant but the finish came from a kick he admits was not a part of his gameplan. This game is still the harshest one. But whichever man ended up winning, both looked razor sharp in this fight and bouts like these remind us that striking in MMA is in a pretty good place.