Losene Keita - A Rough Diamond

This UFC returns to France this weekend, and they’re taking a solid headliner between Caio Borallho and Nassourdine Imavov. There is also the return of the troubled but talented Benoit Saint Denis, a wheel-spinning match up for Fares Ziam, and the obligatory William Gomis stinker. But you could be forgiven for not knowing that Patricio Pitbull—the greatest fighter in Bellator’s history, a two-weight champion, and now a top fifteen featherweight in the UFC—is also on the card. The announcement came just six days ago that Freire would be taking his third fight of the year, and in it he is serving as a promotional debut for two-weight Oktagon champion, Losene Keita.

At twenty-seven, Keita has already run up an impressive eleven fights with Oktagon and now has a 16-1 record. Keita won the Oktagon lightweight title from European MMA stalwart, Ivan Buchinger in 2022. He then vacated the lightweight belt to pursue the featherweight one, which he claimed by knocking out Nico Samsonidse in 2023. Then he went back up to lightweight and fought through the Oktagon lightweight tournament to take that belt again. For some reason he was not required to vacate the featherweight belt before that last part so he leaves two unoccupied titles in Oktagon as he transitions to the big show.

Last year former Oktagon bantamweight champion, Felipe Lima made the leap to the UFC and left a great impression on viewers. Keita might carry even more hype than Lima because of the many stoppages on his record. The increasing level of competition and significance of fights did little to slow him down as he kept a seventy percent finishing rate.

The Tactical Hokey Cokey

The secret to that finishing rate is pressure. Losene Keita walks forward from minute one, and does not stop until the job is done. Keita’s fight against Predrag Bogdanovic in the lightweight tournament played out like a scenario from Keita’s own visualization exercises. Keita walked Bogdanovic to the fence and Bogdanovic would dive on a panic shot—which Keita sprawled on with ease.

This failure in the wrestling led Bagdanovic to attempt to put in some good faith work on the feet to gain Keita’s respect, but the only thing he felt comfortable doing was low kicking. He did it on the back foot, pushed up against the fence, and this is a disastrous situation to try to low kick out of. Keita blasted him on the counter numerous times.

Keita put Bogdanovic away in the second round with a left hook to the body.

In MMA we often think in terms of grapplers and strikers. A man has a lot of knockouts? He’s a striker. But there are strikers who welcome a striking match, and there are strikers who excel against grapplers. Losene Keita seems to fight at his best as an anti-wrestler, pressing forward and flustering his opponents, ultimately drawing out bad takedown attempts. Successful sprawls tire the opponent out and make them more inclined to shell up.

In Jose Aldo – Advanced Striking 2.0 we discussed how Aldo feeds the single leg. The opponent changes levels and shoots at his hips, and he turns his body behind his left hip and presents them a side-on stance. His right leg is so difficult to access that the opponent settles for the single leg. It takes an explosive takedown attempt and turns it into a tiring technical exchange where the finish will never be as clean as blasting through both legs.  

Keita’s takedown defence is more in the old school style of Mirko ‘Cro Cop’ Filipovic: push forward, then sprawl hard. To sprawl, his lead leg is withdrawn to level with his right. Rather than blading, he squares his body.

Where Aldo’s method is to pivot as the opponent times a level change, Keita’s involves a full reversal of momentum. He must change from advancing onto his left foot, to retracting it completely and giving ground. For this reason, while his pressure is applied from the first moments of the fight, he often does not commit to attacking along the fence in earnest until he has his opponent a little weary of shooting reactive takedowns.

The shortcomings of Keita’s method were demonstrated in his 2023 fight with Agy Sardani. Keita escaped with a controversial decision victory, but was taken down numerous times and visibly stunned on the feet twice. And all of Keita’s trouble stemmed from Sardani faking level changes into punches.

Because Keita sacrifices his stance and squares himself up to defend takedown attempts, he is far more vulnerable to simple straights and uppercuts down the centreline. And to deal with an opponent catching him out with punches, Keita would plant his lead leg and begin engaging in straight up striking exchanges. It was then that Sardani was able to reach out and attach to that leg in a way that he just had not been able to when Keita was only thinking about his wrestling.

This balancing act has been the be-all and end-all of Keita’s game in his Oktagon run. It is almost a bluff: he seems to apply inscrutable pressure, but he is reluctant to commit himself until his opponent has tried to fight their way off the fence a couple of times first.

Patricio Pitbull

This could turn out to be baptism by fire, or a case of being in the right place at the perfect time. Keita’s opponent is the great Patricio ‘Pitbull’ Freire. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that Freire is in the twilight of his career, and yet in terms of pure rankings he just pulled off his best victory to date. A few weeks back, Freire took a convincing decision over Dan Ige and moved into the UFC rankings at number eleven.

Freire was always a low output fighter but he became chronically low output when he discovered karate and decided that he was going to ikken hissatsu his way through the rest of his career. It worked, because he really does have the death touch, but it has always been an obvious achilles heel.

Pedro Carvalho tried to put the pressure on Freire and run him ragged, but this only served to tee up big punches for the little Bellator champion. But there is pressure and then there is pressure. Carvalho attempted frantic activity, marching in behind kicks, often on one leg, always exposed to a return.

Keita’s pressure appears frantic, but he is so cautious not to get out of position that he might be able to drive Freire back and fluster him without putting himself in the line of that brilliant left hook and right hand.

When Keita wants to throw down he often likes to initiate off a high kick or knee, and this seems like a great shout against Pitbull because so much of Freire’s game is in countering the opponent’s step to close the distance. Like Alexander Volkanovski, Freire has been shown to be vulnerable to the open side high kick simply because he always gives up height and reach, and pounding his arm makes it hard for him to quickly fire back counters. AJ McKee and Yair Rodriguez had success in this way, even if Emmanuel Sanchez’s attempts backfired. Ige’s best moment against Freire was a high kick that happened to dome Freire with the knee as he ducked in.

The other question mark is the quality of Freire’s wrestling. Much of his Bellator run was built around a surprising strength and a great inside trip from the clinch, but in recent years he has rounded out the wrestling toolkit. In his fight with Ige he timed some beautiful entries that caught Ige in boxing mode, and chain wrestled to the back bodylock in a timely manner when Ige tried to balance himself. A gut-busting sprawl is a wonderful thing, but the same sprawl all the time, at the first sign of a level change, can be used against a fighter.

With the difference in rate of activity, it seems as though Keita could win this one big on optics even if he does not significantly hurt Freire, who often appears to be made out of stone. Yet Keita is undeniably at his best against opponents who do not propose a multi-dimensional threat. Or at least those who cannot operate it transitionally. Agy Sardari is not the best rounded fighter in the world, but by doing a bit of quality wrestling-to-striking and striking-to-wrestling he gave Keita the roughest fight of his recent run. Freire might be woefully low output, and not the man he was five years ago, but his transitional offence looked extremely slick against Ige.

It might be worth being cautiously optimistic about Losene Keita’s longterm chances in the UFC. He spent a good stretch on the European scene, and seems to have established his style with few changes from fight to fight. But that did not hurt Paddy Pimblett who appeared to make no progress for the extra years he spent outside the UFC, and suddenly made rapid improvements after facing a little adversity against a deeper pool of talent. Hell, Freire himself is a man who was always being brought up with the idea of “UFC level opposition” and he is now succeeding against it in spite of being 20 years deep into his fighting career.

Either way it is a strange and surprising last minute match up, in the most compelling sort of way.