The Killing the King series is our effort to hypothetically undo the dominant champions of MMA. Back in the day we discussed Renan Barao, Ronda Rousey, Anderson Silva, and Jon Jones on multiple occasions because he just won’t lose. This series has appeared at Bloody Elbow, Bleacher Report, Fightland and here at the Fight Primer but if you haven’t seen it before it’s likely because I don’t add to it often. A large part of that was that the landscape of MMA became a lot more cut throat and tumultuous. It is hard to pin down a belt for any length of time in the men’s divisions.

Khabib Nurmagomedov is a fascinating study because even his most ardent fans are well aware that he is not a well rounded fighter. Writing about Anderson Silva or Ronda Rousey in their heyday was met with anger at the idea that they might have flaws or—as we prefer to say in this series—reliable habits. If anything it is more impressive that Nurmagomedov has been able to accomplish so much while being very honest and forthright about how he does it. He is a living testament to Danny Martin’s idea of initiative in MMA: he is always asking the questions and never being forced to provide the answers. So let us get into just who Khabib Nurmagomedov is, or rather who he has become.

Khabib 101

It is probably safe to say that most MMA fans have either forgotten who Khabib Nurmagomedov was when he got to the UFC, or never saw it in the first place. After all, the fashion is to pretend that combat sambo prepares a fighter perfectly for MMA and that Nurmagomedov slotted into mixed martial arts effortlessly after acquiring his sambo accolades. But looking back at the young man who fought Kamal Shalorus and Gleison Tibau in 2012 and then comparing him to the lightweight champion of today offers a stark contrast.

In those early UFC bouts Nurmagomedov spent his time jogging backwards around the ring, bumping into the fence, and dropping on his opponent’s hips as they stepped in to attack. Against Tibau he was able to push the Brazilian to the fence, but was completely ineffective from there as Tibau’s underhooks and base proved unshakeable. In failing to attack with trips and upper body techniques, Nurmagomedov would be forced to attack a single leg. When he got the leg he would try to turn and run the pipe off the fence and Tibau would hop around him, looking unimpressed. It was a fight in which Nurmagomedov attempted thirteen takedowns in fifteen minutes and achieved nought.

Whether Nurmagomedov deserved the victory over Tibau or not is only really a sticking point for those who desperately need to believe in undefeated records and that fighters are perfect out of the womb. The important point is that Nurmagomedov started working with American Kickboxing Academy after that fight and quickly began to look more like the familiar cage wrestler of today.

This article will be divided into three segments. The first is the area in which Nurmagomedov’s opponent is trying to dig themselves out of a hole, the second is pretty much disastrous, and then finally we will consider the range at which Nurmagomedov should be fought.

Keeping the Offensive Cycle

Most often Nurmagomedov will enter on the hips with his head outside his opponent’s right hip. This allows Nurmagomedov to grind his way to upright with the right underhook already in place. This single underhook pin was vital in the success of AKA’s first UFC heavyweight champion, Cain Velasquez.

From the single underhook pin,the best outcome for Khabib is getting his hands together in a bodylock. If he can do this he can begin to impart some force on his man and bring his trips and throws into the mix. After locking his hands Nurmagomedov will step his right foot in tight and get his right hip inside of his opponent as he rotates them off the fence.

This can work out a number of ways. Darrel Horcher—who didn’t have much of a grappling background and certainly wasn’t ready for the Nurmagomedov level of competition—was thrown arse over tits into bottom position. More commonly if Nurmagomedov does throw his opponent to the mat he will end up in some form of half guard.

Most savvy opponents, however, will turn, releasing their overhook, and placing their hands on the mat. The overhook is of course what prevents the man with the bodylock from simply shucking his way behind his opponent. Getting behind the overhook is Nurmagomedov’s speciality and places him in the back bodylock. It is from here that he can repeatedly return his opponent to the mat, force them to carry his weight, and put the hooks in to look for a finish.

The other main option from the bodylock on the cage is the outside trip, which Nurmagomedov will demonstrate from time to time if his opponent’s left leg gets a little close in or far from the cage. But that first bodylock throw (the “DC 2” to borrow James Krause’s terminology) tends to reap higher rewards and place Nurmagomedov in position to keep attacking.

Complicating this part of Nurmagomedov’s game is something that multiple opponents have already done though. If the issue is the bodylock a fighter just needs to prevent Khabib from locking his hands. As Nurmagomedov would often shoot in low to acquire his right underhook, many opponents would spread their feet to create base and then go two-on-one on Nurmagomedov’s left hand. Some had good success gripping his wrist, others used both hands to cup underneath his triceps and elbow.

This has not been a fruitless exercise either. Tibau, Dos Anjos and even McGregor were able to fight off Nurmagomedov’s left hand and create enough movement to swing their own left underhook back through. When Nurmagomedov’s right underhook is taken away he will often just pull away from the clinch and go back to the centre of the cage rather than jostle in the clinch to try and recover it.

There are two problems with this strategy though. The first is the time and punishment it takes to pull this off. Even if you’re not taking a beating, you’re still losing a whole minute or more of the fight to perform an escape that won’t earn you anything in the judges’ eyes.

The second issue has been that in almost all cases when his opponent committed to fighting his hands, Nurmagomedov would rip his left hand back and punch his hand between their legs to attack the single leg. During his early time at AKA he was still looking for the single leg in earnest—trying to step over his opponent’s leg and finish a traditional single by running the pipe. In recent years, however, he has had good success in dropping his hands, locking them under the opponent’s crotch, stepping in tight to pull his man off the cage in the same manner as in the DC 2, and then kicking out their standing leg as they hop around onto it.

You will recall that both Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier were fighting Nurmagomedov’s hand pretty well, until he locked his hands under their crotch and launched them. One peculiar facet of the Pat Healy fight was that Nurmagomedov locked his hands under Healy’s crotch and then abandoned the lift. This could have been due to Healy’s height or at least his long legs: making the lift less like a rack pull and more like some kind of cheat curl.

So there is the counter to Khabib’s A game, met with a counter of his own, but it is still fairly hit and miss because Nurmagomedov doesn’t have the same degree of control over his man here. The key for his opponent seems to be making sure that if Nurmagomedov changes his grip to the single leg, he should be forced onto a single leg properly.

Take a look at this example—Khabib switches his grip on Iaquinta, draws him off the fence and sweeps his hopping foot. This foot sweep works in the same way that any single leg sweep works: the defending fighter’s caught leg is taken out of the way to make room to kick his standing leg. In a traditional head inside single most fighters want to take the leg to the high ankle position to kick out the standing leg.

Nurmagomedov’s sweeps are a little more like the inside trip you will see fighters hit after attempting to run the pipe on a head inside single or high crotch. They have their man hopping one way, they draw the knee up high to their side and step down the inside of it to access the standing leg. Here is Natan Schulte hitting a nice inside trip from the single leg out of a beautiful deep half sequence.

However, Nurmagomedov has lost a number of his opponents if they can force that space between his hips and their own and put him down on the single rather than inside their space and free to kick at their standing leg. After Nurmagomedov scored two successful efforts on him, Iaquinta was able to get his knee in and use it to keep distance between himself and Nurmagomedov, limp legging out and escaping as Nurmagomedov pulled him off the cage.

When Nurmagomedov attempted the same technique on Dos Anjos, the Brazilian pummelled his foot inside of Nurmagomedov’s thigh, accomplishing the same thing as Iaquinta had with his knee, by maintaining the space between Nurmagomedov’s hips and his own.

It was BJJ Scout who pointed out a couple of years ago that forcing Nurmagomedov onto the single and hopping out to the free space seemed like a good idea, and it remains true. The difficulty seems to be in Khabib’s change off from hunting the bodylock to the crotch grip. At that point the man on the fence has to go from keeping his left leg pressed to the fence, to getting some part of it inside Nurmagomedov’s and creating a frame of some kind.

Ground Work

If you end up on the mat with Khabib Nurmagomedov, you probably made a mistake. Even if you’re pretty proud of your guard or your get ups, it was not a good shout to end up there. If all goes well, you never see this part of the fight. But as we noted in Killing the Queen: Ronda Rousey, you cannot fight a specialist and fail to prepare some kind of answers for their specialty. Holly Holm’s performance against Ronda Rousey was a perfect example: she fought a masterclass on the feet and still ended up underneath Rousey but she was so well drilled in her responses to Rousey that those couple of close scrapes weren’t really that close. In fact one of the great secrets of MMA’s biggest upsets has been that if you give the champion a hard time in getting to their area of expertise, they can end up rushing and making mistakes that they otherwise wouldn’t when they get there. With that all said, let’s talk worst case scenarios.

Just as with Khabib’s wrestling, there are actually two types of ground work that the champion engages in: out in the open and along the fence. The open mat is where Nurmagomedov performs heavy pressure passing with his rump pointed at the ring lights and his shoulder driving into his opponent’s gut. While he is a controlling guard passer and will use the half nelson to shut down his opponent if they tried to turn into him, Nurmagomedov has that magic something that Fedor Emelianenko did.

In the old days I used to refer to it as “dynamic ground and pound” to differentiate it from “static ground and pound”. Sitting on people and chucking in arm punches without offering any space is important but Nurmagomedov and Fedor both became more terrifying ground and pounders by taking calculated risks or even making small sacrifices of position. Either man would stand over his opponent or pop up to knee on belly to crack in two or three real blows, acutely aware that the other man’s hips would automatically reset and put him back in guard given the space. Not only does this require trust in your ability to pass guard again, it takes complete confidence in your conditioning to commit to making more work for yourself just to land a few good punches.

But hand trapping is a much larger part of Nurmagomedov’s game than it ever was for Emelianenko. Khabib has become synonymous with the mounted crucifix and has a number of ways of entering it. Sometimes he’ll just smush his hips over the top of the opponent’s inside arm from side control, other times he’ll hop up to put a knee on their throat and then pin their hand to the mat with it when they try to push it off.

When you see Nurmagomedov against strong wrestlers who will let him pass guard in order to turn to their knees, he does a good job of slowing them down with the half nelson, or spinning to the back. This is of course Jiu Jitsu 101 stuff but having what the great John Smith would call “technique speed” on this fundamental transition has carried men like Marcelo Garcia and Gordon Ryan to victories almost on auto-pilot. Except for Garcia or Ryan the spin to the back is to secure the harness and become the backpack, for Nurmagomedov it is to establish himself behind the opponent then hold on to that, performing mat returns and wearing his man down until he sees fit to try something else or the round ends.

But again it was Nurmagomedov’s mastery of the fence that elevated him to the throne. The meta game of mixed martial arts now favours the wall walk so heavily that even if Nurmagomedov takes his opponent down away from the fence, they will almost invariably push themselves back onto it and allow him to commence the nasty series of attacks that he pioneered and which are now changing the sport.

As his opponent scoots to the fence, Nurmagomedov will raise their ankles and lock his feet underneath them. We used to playfully refer to this as the “lame it out” position because Josh Thomson, Johnny Hendricks, Jake Shields and Jason ‘Mayhem’ Miller had all used it to hold for long periods, applying no effective offence and “laming out” the round. In truth it isn’t a great hitting position even for Nurmagomedov, but it prevents the opponent from getting up until the squirm and turn, and Nurmagomedov is able to reach around their back for the posting hand and fold them down onto it. This is what Paul Felder dubbed the “Dagestani handcuff” and everyone from Jack Hermansson to Dan Ige to Bryce Mitchell is now making excellent use of it.

It should be stressed that in trying to undo the work of Khabib Nurmagomedov, this is about the worst spot you can get to. Out in the open, Nurmagomedov relies on raw attributes and his opponent’s mistakes to get on offence. Along the fence he can begin that offensive cycle and put his opponent in a purely defensive spot. Once you are on the mat along the fence, you have to get up before you can do anything and he’s going to slow that down and hit you at every chance. What do you win when you get back up? You’re standing up into the clinch along the fence anyway and for all your thrashing you’ve just managed to swim slightly further out from the water circling the drain.

Before we poo-poo the wall walk altogether it is worth noting that Tyron Woodley found some moments of success against Gilbert Burns who was trying to fold him down on the far wrist. Once he got caught sitting on the fence, Woodley’s answer was to turn off the fence and onto his back, grabbing the underhook from half guard. At that point Woodley built up on a traditional underhook get-up, where that Dagestani handcuff isn’t really an issue. Though Woodley then went on to fight Colby Covington and got caught in that exact same position for longer periods.

This writer is confident that there will be further developments in the cage wrestling game, but certainly cannot predict them. We have been through various phases. Tito Ortiz took opponents to the fence, Chuck Liddell got up on the fence, and it has been a back and forth battle in the MMA meta game ever since. Right now, answers to Nurmagomedov have not been forthcoming and for this reason it would be good to see some fighters try to avoid this one area of combat altogether.

For some time we have been talking about Mansour Barnaoui and his interesting approach to the bottom game. Barnaoui is by no means a jiu jitsu savant but he has a good half guard that he can reliably recover, and he uses the twist sweep to create scrambles. The twist sweep is itself a counter to pressure passing and against Shamil Zavurov—Khabib’s teammate and cousin—Barnaoui was able to sweep time and time again.

This is not to focus on the twist sweep: which is aided by Barnaoui’s lanky build and iron grip on wrist control, but rather that Barnaoui will turn himself off the fence when he is put near it. Does he want to be stuck on the bottom? No. But he recognizes that in many of his match ups, cage walking will only slow him down. And that’s the giant flaw that has been exposed in the wall walk really: it is slow and it can be made slower. Almost everyone can get up at some point against Nurmagomedov, the problem is that it takes a whole round of struggling and getting hit in the face to do so.

In A Filthy Casual’s Guide to Freak Guards we also discussed Nik Lentz and Armen Tsurukyan turning off the fence and using the butterfly guard against Islam Makhachev. Where Lentz looked for sweeps which never came and got caught up in chasing guillotines, Tsurukyan was able to use hook sweep attempts to turn to his knees and come up on scrappy singles.

With that butt high, head low style of forcing the half guard and passing that Nurmagomedov favours there was a great deal of intrigue in a match up with Tony Ferguson. A man who rarely wall walks, fights with his feet on the opponent’s hips a lot of the time, and elbows continuously to good effect from the bottom.

Being a great guard player in MMA is like turning up to a high jump meet with a beautiful scissor kick: it requires you to invest a lot of time in a less effective way of competing. It would be fascinating to see someone with Ryan Hall’s level of comfort on the bottom against Nurmagomedov—particularly as Hall likes to play his guard with feet on the chest rather than the knee shield that Nurmagomedov so regularly stands over and smashes punches through. Upkicks against a kneeling opponent are obviously sorely missed in modern MMA, but feet on the chest can be of great use and some fighters like Ben Saunders will take advantage of the legality of upkicks to the chest to wind the opponent and make space.

With all the discussion we have given to leg entanglements lately you might expect that to factor into the answer for Nurmagomedov, but it’s hard to enter on legs when the opponent won’t even show them. Much of Nurmagomedov’s passing is in that Demian Maia arse-high, head low style. But this brings us to something Davi Ramos showed in the last minute or two of his losing effort against Islam Makhachev. He turned off the fence with Makhachev in his guard, scooped his hand underneath him and caught inside of Makhachev’s leg, and slid his knees in front of Makhachev’s chest.

This is what is called “K-control” or “K-guard” and it’s still somewhat unproven at the high levels of MMA, but Neil Melanson got the idea from Karo Parisyan who used it briefly to stop Georges St. Pierre hitting him from the guard. Grappling savant and all around lovely guy, Lachlan Giles also likes the K-guard for entering on legs. The most recent quality showing it got in MMA was probably when Rafael Lovato gassed out against Gegard Mousasi and used the K-guard to invert, threaten legs, and swing back with triangle attempts all while making Mousasi’s job of finishing a little harder. The K-guard probably saved Lovato in that round.

The reason the K-guard intrigues against Khabib is that it anchors the bottom fighter to the leg, while placing a shield in front of the top man’s upper body. It serves to keep the top fighter’s body somewhat vertical and hinders sprawling out or tripoding to smash pass. It is when fighters stand from inside the K-guard that leg attacks and sweeps become a threat. Are you going to submit Khabib Nurmagomedov from K-control? Almost definitely not. But he ends up in closed guard along the fence a lot, and if your options are 1) stay in closed guard and get thumped or 2) open your guard, scoot back to the fence and immediately get your ankles caught, why not say “fuck it, try some K-guard”?

Nurmagomedov doesn’t take breaks and doesn’t like being static. If a decent grappler were to take K-control grips on him from closed guard it seems a good bet that he’d stand just to make something happen and give a bit more space than if the bottom man were trying to hold closed guard or come up on a single from the knee shield.

A final thought in this section on disaster clean-up is the viability of the kimura. Where you will see a lot of fighters now turning their back in a standing position along the fence and using the kimura or separating the hands, you won’t see people doing it against Nurmagomedov. If you give Khabib the back body lock his elbows are flush to your sides and he’s off balancing you at all times. It’s not the best time to try out your Sakuraba impression.

Multiple fighters have been able to lock the kimura grip from the bottom against Nurmagomedov and then sat there trying to wrench it free while he puts a knee on their head and rips his arm away. The kimura as a means to turn in and begin standing still seems intriguing though. Getting the grip, forcing Nurmagomedov to lock his hands, and then using the knee shield or a butterfly hook to push away and turn to the knees towards Nurmagomedov. This is purely speculative but by getting Nurmagomedov to hide his hands in front of his body and then turning to the knees, a fighter might be able to avoid that brutal back body lock or the wrist rides that Nurmagomedov immediately takes as his opponents go to the turtle, and actually begin to stand up.

Obviously, Kazushi Sakuraba used to do this a lot, but another interesting example is this instance from Matt Lindland versus Quinton Jackson. Because Jackson is defending his arm, Lindland is able to go to his knees and Jackson takes the high crotch rather than trying to open his arms and grab a back bodylock. This writer has been playing with using the knee shield on the biceps of the opponent’s free arm in order to offer more encouragement to attack the high crotch on the way up. Here Lindland immediately changes off to a switch, which is gorgeous, but it’s just another idea for getting up without giving up Khabib’s absolute favourite position.

At Distance

This brings us to the area where Khabib Nurmagomedov has least control over his opponent and the area in which any challenger should be focusing his efforts. The temptation would be to call it “striking range” but for Nurmagomedov it is really more “initiation range.” The distance from which Nurmagomedov begins his charges and his long, diving shots.

It is pleasantly surprising that in spite of Nurmagomedov dropping McGregor and jabbing Iaquinta’s face to ribbons, the general consensus is that his striking is functional. There are some strange habits—the wide eyed pull back with the chin in the air being the most obvious—but aside from looking a bit odd he has never embarrassed himself on the feet and has been able to hold his own.

The leaping left hook used to be Nurmagomedov’s weapon of choice because in loading it up he could look as if he were changing levels. In recent years he has tried to bring a bit more of his boxing to lever. He loves both the lead uppercut and the right uppercut, and recognizes their value in raising the opponent up before he changes levels and dives after their hips or lead leg.

You will even get some odd shoulder roll work out of Nurmagomedov but that isn’t really important for our purposes today. Everything else is just window dressing because Nurmagomedov wants to wrestle. To sum up Nurmagomedov’s plan at range in a nutshell it is: enter low, finish high. This is where the idea of “tenacity” is so important. Nurmagomedov often takes bad shots. Similar to Jacare Souza, he won’t so much change levels as throw himself towards the opponent’s ankles. The difference is that Nurmagedov keeps going. From Michael Johnson to Al Iaquinta to Rafael dos Anjos—plenty of men have spotted the shot coming, sprawled out on top of Nurmagomedov, and then he has built up into the clinch and pushed them back onto the fence anyway.

Initially I believed that elusive footwork and ring generalship was the answer to Khabib Nurmagomedov. There aren’t many good ring generals in MMA so we still haven’t seen it, but watching him sprint around the cage after Edson Barboza who can’t stay off the fence for love nor money was encouraging. Then the McGregor fight happened and actually showed the opposite approach has value as well.

It seemed odd for McGregor to fight the same fight against Nurmagomedov that he had against everyone else, but especially as the fight went on you got glimpses into the value of pushing Nurmagomedov back. Yes, there was a ton of cheating going on on McGregor’s part, but this example from the third round contains no fouls and demonstrates beautifully the value of forcing Khabib back.

Some fighters choose to shoot with their back to the fence. Tyron Woodley did it from time to time, Rustam Khabilov and Ali Bagautinov loved it. The idea was that if you took someone down into the middle of the ring, they were as far as possible from any of the fence panels they would use to build up. Additionally if you stand near the fence, there’s a great chance your opponent overcommits, comes in swinging, and you get his hips far easier than if you were forced to go to him.

The downside of shooting into space is that there is lots of room for the opponent to get his hips back and fight you off. Nurmagomedov comes in so low a lot of the time that space is really what is needed more than anything. When Al Iaquinta stood his ground and Nurmagomedov dived in after singles, Iaquinta was able to let Nurmagomedov go to the mat and limp leg out.

In the first round of the Iaquinta fight, Nurmagomedov was able to take the low single and chase it up to the feet. But every subsequent instance of Iaquinta hitting the mat came from him running onto the fence. Especially as Iaquinta’s legs became more slippery as the fight went on. Fighting Khabib Nurmagomedov or Rousimar Palhares is the one time that I can get on board with Sugar Ray Leonard’s obsession with every fighter getting a good sweat on before the introductions.

So this is the compelling part of any match up between Nurmagomedov and a good anti-wrestler. If they stand their ground and understand where they are in the ring, he doesn’t have an awful lot to back them up. And for those of us who daydream about an appropriately sized lightweight Jose Aldo, the idea of an aggressive performance where every Nurmagomedov shot is be pushed down onto the single and limp legged or pulled up into a clinch in the open, shimmers beautifully in the mind’s eye. But alas, despite my letters Jose Aldo will not gain weight and cut age.

A confrontational performance might be something that Justin Gaethje can offer. While today we are not talking specifically about Gaethje but about general ideas, if Gaethje could at least produce the same sprawl-and-brawl dynamic on the feet that Iaquinta did he would be in good stead as low kicks are a weapon that seem well matched to Nurmagomedov but that he so seldom faces. Edson Barboza is a fantastic low kicker, but he could barely set his feet for a moment as Nurmagomedov jogged into the clinch over and over. An opponent who has the wrestling means and the confidence to stand his ground or even back Nurmagomedov up can begin to open up the opportunity to apply the low low kick.

Standing low and ready to deal with the shot forced Nurmagomedov to begin applying the jab against Iaquinta. Iaquinta wouldn’t slip a jab if you covered it in dog poo, but someone with a good low kicking game wouldn’t even need to in order to start counter kicking effectively. Returning on jabs with low-low kicks might prove a nightmare for Nurmagomedov who has never had to care where his feet are and often has his lead foot and knee turned in. Do note that we are talking about the low-low kick which is considerably harder to grab a hold of than the traditional low kick to the thigh.

The low-low kick is a great way to hamper boxing and particularly jabbing as it punishes the opponent for putting his lead foot in. As the Iaquinta fight progressed, Nurmagemedov was using the jab to stand closer and closer to Iaquinta to reduce the length of his shots for the legs which, of course, take a lot more effort when they start seven feet out. But more than that, Nurmagomedov’s game is built so heavily on his agility and forward pressure—everything from his shots to his guard passing to his single underhook pin relies heavily on his legs. Getting in some good shots to the lead leg could quickly change the complexion of a fight against Nurmagomedov.

For a fighter who didn’t have that confidence sprawling, limp legging or drawing Nurmagomedov up into the clinch, an evasive gameplan would certainly be a better idea: circling the cage and allowing Nurmagomedov to tire himself out with charges at least until he settles down. I have heaped praise on Nurmagomedov’s gas tank in this article but no one sprints after engagements forever. Eventually they all take their foot off the gas and get into a more measured fight. Pearls will doubtless be clutched if we compare Nurmagomedov to Ronda Rousey, but both gained enormously from errors in their opponents’ ringcraft, and neither was a particularly skilled ring cutter. Just as Holly Holm took the first four minutes off from actually striking just to dodge Rousey and let her work it out of her system, for a non-wrestler a round of evasion at all costs would be a very good idea against Khabib.

Whether the performance is confrontational or elusive, the fence is the key. Too few fighters only have a vague idea of how close they are to the fence and you will see too many examples of Nurmagomedov running into his Bethe Correia style flailing flying knees and then dropping down perfectly to his opponent’s hips as they hit the fence. This is probably in part due to few fighters having a full size cage to train in, but also it is very much a skill: you cannot see the fence behind you and honestly if you can see the black line on the mat in front of you, you’re already close enough to the fence that Khabib can shoot, build up and press you into it.

That is the upshot of an offensive performance against Nurmagomedov: you don’t have to know where the cage is because if you’re pushing him back, you’re making the largest possible distance between yourself and the fence that’s behind you. In an elusive performance, a fighter needs to take his distance from the centre of the mat or from the opposite fence. In boxing the commonly taught method is the opposite ropes, but there you’re fighting in a square and not an almost circle, so for MMA distance from the centre might be the most practical.

Either way, the theme of this series has always been that you don’t need to find a button to make someone implode. You don’t even need to hold off their A game for twenty five hard minutes. The most important step in beating one of these great champions (except the classic “wait until they’re old” trick) is to take away the thing they most like to do just long enough that they try something else. If you’re a world class fighter and you can get anyone onto the stuff they only really do in the gym against the awkward guys who know them, you are in with a fighting chance.

The fence is where Khabib Nurmagomedov has made his legacy. It seems safe to say that the man who beats Khabib will not do it in spite of the fence work. The idea of landing that one big uppercut after the ref breaks you or at the start of the third round is just such a ropey premise. No, the man who beats Khabib will do it by having an answer to or by completely avoiding the fence work.

Consider checking out Advanced Striking 2.0: Anderson Silva before his retirement fight next weekend, Absolute Masterclass: Garbrandt vs Cruz for some more about ringcraft, and Absolute Masterclass: Oliveira vs Lee for some elite lightweight MMA grappling.