There has never been a shortage of kickboxers coming out of Morroco. The Morrocan-Dutch connection has provided us with plenty North African bangers coming up through the kickboxing promotions of the Netherlands. The most notable of these was the heavyweight bad boy, Badr Hari whom we gave the business in Advanced Striking 2.0. There is no denying that Hari’s best days are behind him though, and one of the men placed to take his spot as Morroco’s new king of kickboxing is the current ONE Championship flyweight kickboxing champion, Ilias Ennahachi.

Watching Ennahachi he stands out immediately as a man who makes use of a lot of footwork. Many of the best kickboxers in the world come from Muay Thai competition and are much more economical in their movements than Ennahachi. Others from the Dutch lineage are more inclined to rely on catch and pitch style fighting than on evading the opponent with their feet. One of the reasons that Giorgio Petrosyan stood out in K-1 and Glory was his use of lateral movement and pivots from traditional boxing in a kickboxing context, where so few fighters seem to want to rely on them. But Petrosyan deviates from the line of attack only when he must or when he thinks the time is right. Compared to Petrosyan, Ennahachi’s movement seems downright erratic.

Ennahachi’s style is one of two extremes. He uses a great deal of lateral movement to circle the ring, and to draw the opponent forward and run them onto punches—but he also likes to work out of a long, bladed stance. This means that a lot of his time is spent stabbing his lead foot in as a preparatory move in advance of an actual attack, or drawing it back level to his rear foot in preparation to circle the ring. In ONE Championship, where the promotion of multiple rulesets on a single card is causing some blur at the edges, this is proving particularly interesting. It is pretty telling that Ennahachi’s finest performance came as Petchdam ineffectively followed him around a gigantic circular cage, then a few months later Wang Wenfeng ran Ennahachi ragged along the ring ropes and in the corners.

You will see Ennahachi using side-skipping and classical side steps. He is a big proponent of skipping out the side door and kicking the lead leg—Joanna Jedrzejczyk’s favourite but point scorer more than a leg-mangler. Ennahachi benefits from being mainly an annoyance, then showing flashes of real venom.

His fight changing punch on Petchdam was a Tony Canzoneri style clothesline as he stepped off to the left side. This likely would never have found the mark if he hadn’t have been needling and running up to that home-run swing.

Similarly his check hook was one of the few weapons he was able to use effectively against Wang Wenfeng in his last fight, and has been a staple against opponents who want to chase him back off his fake entries.

That quick shift of gears between obnoxious point scorer and genuine knockout threat is where Ennahachi makes his money. Another factor in Ennahachi’s success is his use of false entries. As he likes to strike from a long stance and move from a short one, Ennahachi will make an exaggerated step forward to get into his stance before striking. By doing this and then bouncing back off his lead foot to retract it from range he can have opponents swinging low kicks or punches at nothing and move in on them in the aftermath. This is something Tiffany van Soest also uses a great deal.

While Ennahachi fakes his entries time and time again throughout a bout, trying to get the opponent to bite on the feint or dull their reactions, the tactic is at its most noticeable when he is moving in on a wounded foe. After a knockdown, any kickboxer with an ounce of experience is going to swarm for the finish because even if you can’t land good shots, hyperactivity against an opponent’s gloves has forced hundreds of stoppages in the ring. This also means that most hurt fighters immediately try to counter and / or fall into a clinch. Perhaps the most famous instance of this is Badr Hari getting off the canvas and immediately starching Ruslan Karaev with a counter right hand as he charged in to finish.

As the ref steps aside and allows Ennahachi to pursue the finish against a hurt opponent he almost always takes the time to fake his entry, bounce back off his lead foot, and then re-enter legitimately. Sometimes this simply gets an opponent covering up, other times they throw a punch or a kick and throw themselves out of position before he comes in to shellack them with flurries.

Closing with High Kicks

When we discuss kicking we often get into the open side and the closed side. The easy way to describe it is “where the opponent’s belly button is pointing, that’s the open side”. For orthodox fighters their open side is their right, for southpaw fighters it is their left. The general rule for kicking—which you should regularly break but can benefit from following for the most part—is to kick into the open side on the upper body and the closed side on the lower body. This is because on the open side you are only contending with your opponent’s rear forearm and wrist (which you might well be able to break), and on the closed side you will be buckling your opponent’s knee inwards or sweeping his foot across his stance.

One of the important exceptions to the rule is sneaking the high kick over the opponent’s lead shoulder. The trouble with this is that the opponent can move their head, they can turn their back, they can duck their head down slightly below the line of their shoulder and your kick can do nothing. One of the ways that Ennahachi makes the over-the-shoulder kick more of a threat is to switch to whichever stance he needs to be in an open position with his opponent (southpaw vs orthodox or vice versa). Then he fires of a combination and uses the lead leg high kick to reset to range and blade his stance on the end of a combination. This is like “closing the door” on an attack by ending with a left hook or jab—but instead the lead foot sneaks up over the opponent’s shoulder as they are pulling back into their own stance or pursuing him out of range.

These over the lead shoulder high kicks were a key part of Ennahachi’s most famous performance, when he knocked out Petchdam to win the ONE kickboxing title. In that fight Petchdam fought heavy on his lead leg and attempted to time counter kicks with his rear leg. Ennahachi fought elusively—faking his entries and circling off, or popping a couple of quick punches and teeping Petchdam away.

The effect was to make Petchdam more committed to following and this placed Petchdam’s lead foot on a platter. Ennahachi was able to use a step up low kick to sweep the lead foot across—in the same style that Arnold Allen does in the UFC— followed immediately by the over-the-shoulder high kick off the same leg. The result was that Ennahachi’s foot clacked off the back of Petchdam’s head in the style of professional wrestling’s enzuigiri. The best part of the combination is that kicking the lead foot across the opponent can turn them side on and allow the kick to come over the back of the head, or break the opponent’s balance and cause their lead hand and shoulder to leave position on the instinct to stay upright.

While the over-the-shoulder high kick is a tricky shot that pays off from time to time for Ennahachi, his choice to end every combination with a high kick can catch his man out on the open side just as often. Again Ennahachi’s movement based style plays into this—he gets his man chasing him, then intercepts them with a knee off his rear leg. As he recovers his leg he pushes their head back with the same side glove, before rebounding the same foot off the floor for a high kick: three strikes off the same side.

These aren’t just occasional tricks that Ennahachi pulls out of his toolbox when he needs a breakthrough, they’re the principles around which he builds most of his engagements. He moves laterally, fakes his entries, engages, then closes his combination or re-establishes his distance with the high kick and it works a treat when you see it all come together.

Ilias Ennahachi is currently ranked #3 in the world at 60kg by Combat Press and is well regarded by those in kickboxing, but he particularly interests this writer as his style seems well suited to transition to MMA. Not Ennahachi himself but the principles of his style which is a little bit more mobile and long-distance than a lot of those at the highest levels of pure kickboxing. His desire to get into an open position in spite of his personal preference of stance is something else you see in karate and taekwondo but don’t see so much in other combat sports. If you like high kicks and fancy movement, Ennahachi is definitely a man to keep your eye on.