Jean Silva - The Thoughtful Striking of a Madman

The Fighting Nerds provided some welcome excitement last year. Just as we were entering another period of “cage wrestlers are ruining the sport” discourse, a team of strikers from Brazil tore through multiple UFC divisions at the same time. It was helped along by the fact that the four Fighting Nerds stars could have been designed by Jamie Hewlett. They were a rag-tag assortment of oddballs, with only the vaguest of suggestions at any sort of team style. 

Carlos Prates was a gangly, hard drinking, chain smoker.  Caio Borralho, the brains of the team, patched together from Demian Maia and Lyoto Machida instructionals. Mauricio Ruffy, a man who made a point of looking away as he landed counter punches. And finally, Jean Silva, an unwavering juggernaut whose only weakness seemed to be a love for combat that might move him to break down in tears in the middle of a bout. Prates lost to Garry, Borralho to Imavov, and Ruffy to Saint-Denis. Now Jean Silva is the last man standing.

The crux of Jean Silva’s game is that old Cus D’amato ideal of “elusive aggression.” Silva is all bravado and forward movement, but a lot of his best hitting is done on the counter and he is a tough man to crack clean even when he spends most of the round encroaching on the opponent. Here is a quick clip of the sort of dance Silva is constantly engaged in: crowding his opponent, but immediately dropping away if they lash out. Notice how Silva’s lead hand is low, but his elbow is drawn back, ready to loop his left hand across the top if his opponent pursues him.

The Short Guide to Jean Silva can be gleaned from his fight with Charles Jourdain. Silva presses forward, lashing out occasionally on offence, but drops back towards the centre of the cage whenever Jourdain attempts to get going.

While Jean Silva fights nothing like the ultra-passive Lyoto Machida, Charles Jourdain falls into the same old Machida trap. With Silva dropping away from him every time Jourdain attempts to engage, Jourdain convinces himself that he just has to push forward faster and harder. He falls victim to “the extra step” and it serves up a picture perfect counter left hook for Silva.

Jean Silva knocked out Jourdain in just his second UFC appearance. Silva then jumped up in weight to take on a recently ranked lightweight in Drew Dober, at short notice. He stopped Dober with cuts in the third round. The next two opponents fared no better. The reason that Silva is so enormously hyped right now is not simply that he is beating much more experienced opponents, but that he is stopping them and taking little damage in the course of doing so.

Education of a Lunatic

While his enormous success over a short period will be hard to replicate, Jean Silva’s path to the UFC was a well trodden one. He began fighting in gymnasiums in Brazil, and that was the way it stayed for his first twelve fights. Some of these fights can be found on Youtube, and a good number cannot. Silva did not leave Brazil until his thirteenth fight, when he turned up on Dana White’s Contender Series, and since then fighting has carried him to Vegas, Denver, Seattle and Miami.

In those earliest fights you can see that Silva has plenty of experience and confidence in striking, and wants to open up with combinations as early and often as possible. He did run into the expected grappler-check, in the form of Gabriel Schlupp, in his fifth fight, but his first loss was a little more interesting than just being held down.

In his third professional MMA fight, Jean Silva met a man by the name of Pedro “Psycopata” Henrique and the two got along like a house on fire. Never have two fighters better matched each other’s “freak.” Every time a good punch was landed, the two touched gloves and applauded each other. But unlike all of Silva’s UFC opponents, who have sheepishly touched gloves with him while worrying about staying upright, Henrique had Silva struggling.

Silva was having his usual fun until about halfway through the first round, when Henrique switched from orthodox to southpaw. Suddenly Henrique began landing a crisp southpaw right hand whenever Silva opened up. When Silva missed a huge right uppercut in round two, a southpaw counter jab crushed his nose and had him breathing through his mouth for the rest of the fight.

Henrique also found success in cornering Silva. By pushing Silva back to the fence, he was able to get to Silva’s body without the threat of the lean back counters Silva favours.

In spite of all this good work, Henrique insisted on fighting in spurts out of his orthodox stance, where he lost most exchanges, and managed to downplay himself into a close split decision victory. We will return to these tactics later—as they still show effectiveness against Silva—but the main takeaway is that after this fight, Silva stopped trying to run forward and rattle off combinations.

Following his two early professional losses, Silva developed a longer stance and came to rely on the counter left hook, retreats, and lean-backs. He still fights aggressively, but not behind run-up left kicks and three punch combinations.

The counter left hook has been Silva’s bread and butter, but his adoption of this technique on offence has also been a big part of his success.

Watching Silva fight out of his longer stance, jump in with his head off to the right, and chop a wide swinging left hook almost downwards on his opponent, one cannot help but be reminded of the great Igor Vovchanchyn and his “lead overhand.” For more on him, refer to Igor Vochanchyn - Advanced Striking 2.0

Like Vovchanchyn, Silva often uses the leaping, wide swing to follow up with a short, straight right down the pipe which does the real damage.

You will recall that poor Westin Wilson found himself on the end of this little combination about five times in the course of being stopped in the first round.

After Henrique gave Silva a boxing lesson from southpaw stance, it is curious to note that Jean Silva’s entire UFC run has been fought against southpaws. The counter left hook has proven even more potent against them because most southpaws do not draw their lead hand back to cover effectively as they throw their left hand. If they do no best his left hand in the handfight, it is usually free to sneak in over their lead shoulder as they extend into their attack.

On the lead, Silva’s main concern against southpaws is navigating the handfight. His tactics are simple but effective. If he can get the opponent reaching forward to engage his lead hand, while he is looping it around the outside, he can find their chin behind it. He will also switch stances to attempt the same thing as a southpaw if he is against an orthodox opponent.

Here Charles Jourdain is checking the lead hand effectively and Silva takes a small step back to disengage, before coming in and firing over Jourdain’s reaching right hand. This is also something that Alex Pereira will try to do, even though he has his own problems with the open stance handfight.

In this instance, Silva offers up dominant hand position to Drew Dober, tapping up into Dober’s palm from below. He likely wants to time his usual swing behind a Dober reach, but instead Dober withdraws to a guard and Silva is free to throw anyway.

The handfight is terrific when you win it. Go and watch Magomed Ankalaev basically shut Alex Pereira’s left hook out of the contest. But to handfight, a fighter is still committing his own lead hand to reach for the opponent’s, and doing that at the wrong time is allocating precious defensive resources to the wrong place.

When Silva chased down Melsik Baghdasaryan, he performed theatrical circles of his left arm, above his head and down below his waist, just to keep his hand free to hit.

To this writer’s mind, Silva’s most impressive performance might have come on the Contender Series. Kevin Vallejos is not as well known as Drew Dober and Bryce Mitchell, but his skillset asked some tough questions of Silva.

Vallejos is one of the better offensive counter punchers you will see in mixed martial arts. He pushes forward, keeps a high guard and a mobile head, and the moment his opponent pokes out a jab or lashes out with a big swing, he slips and starts tearing off combinations.

Silva’s method is to push forward and fluster opponents, getting them to serve up easy counters. Vallejos came out and immediately refused to give ground to Silva. If Silva tried to punch Vallejos back, Vallejos would slip and come back in combination.

This fight highlights how elusive Silva’s head is, even when he has missed and thrown himself out of position. It also showed Silva’s use of the high double forearms guard. This is an important part of Silva’s game because in between the low hands retreats, the lean backs, and the committed counters, he will make some misreads and have to make the best of a bad situation. You can watch Drew Dober tee off at Silva along the fence and land very little because of Silva’s high forearms and head movement.

The crucial moment of the fight came when Silva was able to get Vallejos out of his face. He did this with a generous application of elbows. Silva adores elbow strikes, and throws them in every fight, but they have never been more important to the flow of the fight than against Vallejos.

One of the reasons it is tough to pocket box in Muay Thai (aside from the clinch) is the ever looming threat of a single, glancing elbow slicing your face open and ruining your night. A few good elbow attempts from Silva and Vallejos was back in the centre of the cage. Some more elbows and kicks and suddenly Vallejos was on the back foot. Then, with an opponent who was hesitating to slip his head, Silva was able to get his own hands going.

Beating Jean Silva

Jean Silva’s opponents have hit on a number of effective tactics even in the course of being devastated by him. The southpaw right hook is still a major annoyance for him, but especially so when he is forced to lead with his right hand.

When Silva loses the hand fight, or his opponent is proving hard to hit with the leaping left hook, Silva will throw a right hand lead and almost invariably gets countered off this.

Silva also loves the lean-back against kicks from the open side. This can lead to fighters getting horribly out of position, as Drew Dober does here.

But when a fighter applies a deep lean like this, his lead leg and body are very much available. Dober hit some lovely body kicks and inside thigh kicks in his fight with Silva. Even noted non-hitter Bryce Mitchell had success doing this.

Even when the kicker misses and is out of position, it can be leveraged against the counter striker. Obviously the highlight reels of this sport, Muay Thai and kickboxing are full of fighters missing kicks and spinning through on a backfist or elbow. But even without the spin, the kicker can use his elbows to fall into the opponent and create a car crash.

Just last weekend, Stella Hemetsberger won the ONE Championship Muay Thai title in a close decision over Jackie Buntan, scoring two knockdowns in the first round by timing Buntan off missed kicks.

The issue of having his back foot pressured to the fence has not disappeared since the Pedro Henrique fight because so much of Silva’s style still involves falling back into space. Like Conor McGregor, he pushes forward to fluster the opponent, but also to ensure the buffer zone behind him to retreat through without hitting the cage.

When Silva is against the fence, he cannot lean or pull away from strikes, and he cannot retreat. It is here that he is at his most vulnerable, and Drew Dober did terrific work to the body and legs along the cage in their fight.

But Dober repeatedly gave Silva an out. After landing a good body kick, Dober would take a big run up and lunge into a punching exchange with his head up in the air, and Silva would time the counter left hook and run out the side door. Had Dober not jumped into punching exchanges with such enthusiasm, he could have continued to hold Silva’s feet to the fire along the cage.

As is always the case, the relentless fight schedule has snuck up on this writer and we have not even gotten to the interesting way that Jean Silva combines the ninja choke with the guillotine and a reverse underhook insertion along the fence, in a way that is a little bit smarter than just “jumping the guilly” as the first line of defence. Or what Diego Lopes can do about the problem of Jean Silva in their fight this weekend.

Lopes is an orthodox fighter with slow feet and bad gameplans… but he does have good calf kicks, a great chin, and a penchant for the double collar tie, which could all be brought into action against a shorter opponent who has largely refused to check low kicks in his UFC run.

For more on Diego Lopes check out Alexander Volkanovski’s Smooth Side Stepping System, and for more high level striking goodness, check out Jersey Joe Walcott - Advanced Striking 2.0