How Islam Makhachev Defended the Crown Against Dustin Poirier
Islam Makhachev demonstrated his cunning and grit to their full at UFC 302, and was elevated to an even higher level by the quality of his opponent. Thirteen years into his own UFC tenure, Dustin Poirier defied all expectations and was the very definition of a “challenger” for Makhachev.
Before we dive into some of the details of this bout, I want to note that this was one of those great fights where both fighters were operating at such a level of quality and physical ability that every exchange was a treat. For each success one man found, the other was immediately coming back. Poirier the “striker” shocked in the wrestling, while Makhachev the “grappler”—showed off his terrific boxing once again. Each time they came together they swam through striking and clinching range and back out and each phase saw both men acting and reacting on a hair trigger. That is to say that I will skip over a lot today for the sake of a deadline, but this is the kind of fight I could happily revisit a dozen times.
Starting at the Fence
When Dustin Poirier first fought for the title, against Khabib Nurmagomedov, his goal along the fence was to prevent the champion from achieving a bodylock. Just like Makhachev, many of Nurmagomedov’s best takedowns had come from achieving the bodylock along the fence, stepping a knee inside his opponent’s, and throwing them over that hip.
Both Dustin Poirier and Conor McGregor worked diligently to control one of Nurmagomedov’s hands and prevent him from locking his hands together around their waist, and against both he eventually dropped his weight, punched his hands together between their legs, and used a grip underneath their crotch to lift them, before kicking out their standing leg.
Where Nurmagomedov resorted to this after testing all his other options, Makhachev stormed over to Poirier and used it in the opening seconds to confirm that it still worked.
Fig. 1
While later attempts did not meet with the success of Makhachev’s first, he was able to use the same move to get behind Poirier in round four, simply dropping the leg and stepping around Poirier as the American posted his hands on the mat for balance.
Fig. 2
Figure 3 shows Makhachev achieving his bodylock in the third round. Locking his hands around Poirier, Makhachev steps a knee inside (or in this case, all the way in front), and throws Poirier over it. Unlike many Makhachev opponents, Poirier does not give up his whizzer to post hands on the mat, and instead posts one hand while maintaining the overhook (c). But Makhachev has moved him into a less athletic position and begins circling towards his back anyway.
Fig. 3
But in the four and a bit rounds of the fight, that was the only example of Makhachev achieving the critical path of his cage wrestling gameplan. Through much of the fight, Poirier’s pummeling looked terrific. Let us examine an instance from round two.
Makhachev picks up the single leg out in the open and uses this to run Poirier to the fence (a). As they hit the fence, Makhachev flattens out into the single underhook pin: he has a left underhook and is fighting to beat or control Poirier’s left hand with his right (b). As Makhachev is working on that side, Poirier gives up his whizzer and begins sliding his hand and forearm down in front of Makhachev’s collar bone (c).
Fig. 4
While Makhachev achieves his wrist control on Poirier’s left hand (d), Poirier is still grinding his own right hand down the inside of Makhachev’s collar bone. As his elbow clears the line of Makhachev’s shoulders, Poirier can square up and use the underhook (e). He punches his left hand towards Makhachev’s armpit which takes the thin part of his wrist through the weak point of Makhachev’s grip—where thumb and fingers meet (e). As Makhachev’s grip pops off, Poirier gains a second underhook (f) and he is able to use this to turn Makhachev onto the fence and disengage.
Fig. 5
The flowing action of this fight complicates my job here, because I wanted to focus on cage wrestling but to understand Poirier’s success in defending Makhachev’s fence work we have to return to the centre of the cage. Much of Poirier’s striking was led by a jab and dip. The jab scored decently for him through the bout, but the level change afterwards was not to set up a counter but to get him into position to defend a level change. The majority of times that Makhachev ducked in for a single leg in this bout, Poirier had an arm inside and was either digging an underhook or had one when Makhachev ran that single leg to the fence.
Returning to the cage wall, one of the most exciting moments of the bout came as Dustin Poirier hit a switch from a bad position along the fence. Stuck in the familiar Team Khabib back bodylock, Poirier seemed to steal a trick from Alexander Volkanovski: turning head first into the cage.
Fig. 6
After that bout we ruminated on the fact that all of Makhachev’s mat returns involve him stepping around the side of his opponent and either driving them forward onto their hands in a line parallel to the fence or lifting them. In Returning to Makhachev vs Volkanovski I we speculated:
To trip the opponent, Makhachev would have to step around the side, block the knee or foot, and drive Volkanovski forward onto his hands or face. The problem there is that Volkanovski’s head is braced against the cage. At two points in the fight Makhachev decided to go for it anyway and wound up pulling Volkanovski down on top of him and creating a scramble.
Fig. 7
Figure 8 shows the entire sequence of Poirier’s switch. He begins on his hands with Makhachev behind him, parallel to the fence (a). As Makhachev steps around the side of Poirier, Poirier turns himself into the fence (b), (c), and Makhachev strains and fails to lift him (d). Poirier turns back into Makhachev, reaches over the arm of the bodylock and creates a switch by grabbing inside the thigh and sitting through (e). This throws Makhachev forward and he unlocks his hands and allows Poirier to scramble up (f), (g).
Fig. 8
There is an additional detail here. On most switches a fighter sits through. On this switch, Poirier leaves his right leg on the wrong side of Makhachev and extends it for Makhachev to trip over. This is something that Felipe Andrew does to off balance opponents in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and no gi competition.
The Striking
Islam Makhachev’s boxing looked sensational in this bout. One of the big questions coming in was how he would deal with a fellow southpaw who was more than competent. Makhachev had not met many southpaws and combat sports is full of examples of southpaws who could not hack it when their preferred open stance match up was taken away.
Luiz Cane had a smashing early run in the UFC’s light heavyweight division, slapping down his opponent’s lead hand and shooting southpaw left straights down the pipe. He was beginning to look like a real contender until he met Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, who was also a southpaw, and won a Pan American games medal in boxing. As it turned out, Cane relied almost entirely on the mystique and quirkiness of simply being a southpaw, and when his preferred stance match up was removed he got finished in under two minutes.
The other possibility is that the southpaw—put into a same stance match up—is allowed to let his textbook boxing shine through and use his lead hand with an activity he previously couldn’t. Manny Pacquiao’s fight with David Diaz is a perfect example of this, wherein Pacquiao answered all the criticisms of being “just a left hand.”
Happily, we can class Makhachev in the second camp. He used this fight as a chance to let his lead hand shine. His jab was sharp, his counter right hook was a nuisance, and he used double ups to irritate Poirier thoroughly. There wasn’t time to make diagrams of every combination I enjoyed but a theme was using round shots to set up linear pokes. The 1-3-2 was seen multiple times in this bout, but also the 3-1: throwing a wide right hook and then pumping a quick jab up the inside of the opponent’s guard. He even used the double jab to draw out Poirier’s reactions or force a cover up to hide the ever-looming level change.
In fact the southpaw vs southpaw, closed stance match up took away more from Poirier than from Makhachev. Poirier’s shifting overhand right was nowhere to be seen and when he did shift, he used it as a feint to draw out Makhachev’s counters—he never committed to it. Instead Poirier was locked into using his own excellent jab and a one-two.
This relatively simple two handed work allowed Makhachev to show off his counter right hook and pivot a couple of times. Figure 9 shows an example. Poirier jabs Makhachev in the snoot (b), and Makhachev leans back to score the counter right hook (d) as Poirier surges forward. Makhachev’s feet have pivoted to parallel, which means that rather than side step, he can take a step backwards (towards his rump) with his left foot and effectively pivot around Poirier. Poirier flies by with a missed left hand.
Fig. 9
This same tool was very useful against Volkanovski when he attempted to charge in off his shifting right hooks.
Fig. 10
But most of the really interesting striking in this fight played out in the clinch. With both men fighting in and out of clinches constantly, the in-between became a battlefield. I have noted that Makhachev might be the best practitioner of the double collar tie in MMA right now. He can catch it from his own offensive clinch work, he can catch it in counter to his opponent’s clinch work, and he can catch it mid-exchange. Especially against an opponent who will try to slip his punches, Makhachev will meet them halfway with the double collar tie and use it to score knees.
Both Makhachev and Poirier demonstrated one of the underrated clinch weapons in this fight: the lead hand uppercut. Taking a collar tie with the lead hand and swinging with the rear hand is natural. Taking a collar tie and switching your stance so that your lead leg is underneath your punching hand, driving it upwards, is some really savvy dirty boxing. Figure 11 shows Poirier with the collar tie, establishing his free hand side as the lead leg, driving an uppercut through, and gaining the double collar tie as a result (d).
Fig. 11
Figure 12 shows an instance from round five that hammers home the level both fighters were working on, and how alert to the clinch Poirier was even in round five. Poirier jabs (b), and Makhachev inside parries and counters with his own left hand (c). Makhachev falls in with the punch (c) and digs the underhook with the same hand (d). This is a perfect piece of punch-and-clutch and against all but the most elite fighters, on their best day, will result in a solid clinch.
But Poirier immediately gets the web of his left hand into the crook of Makhachev’s right elbow. This control lasts all through this sequence but best seen in frame (i). Swinging his underhooked arm over Makhachev’s head (f), (g) Poirier is able to get his right hand underneath Makhachev’s armpit. With the pit post and the biceps post, he can push Makhachev away. All this happens in the space of a few seconds.
Fig. 12
Figure 13 shows the ridiculousness of trying to analyze any one moment of this fight without bleeding over into all the others. Poirier jabs (b) and dips (c) in anticipation of the level change that Makhachev makes. Makhachev comes up swinging his right hook and Poirier ducks it (d)
Fig. 13
Makhachev folds down behind his shoulder anticipating the return (e), and Poirier shoots the left uppercut (f). As Poirier loads up a right hook, Makhachev beats him to the punch (g). The two trade again an Makhachev pivots out (h), (i). You could watch every fight the UFC puts on for another five years and you would only see a handful where the fighters moved through each phase of combat so smoothly and were so well prepared for each other.
Fig. 14
It might be a bit much to suggest that Makhachev needed a finish in the fifth round: he had largely outlanded Poirier and found himself in some dominant positions in spite of Poirier’s obvious improvements. But he came out for the fifth determined to get the stoppage anyway.
Poirier’s success stemmed from keeping himself off the fence and, ideally, Makhachev on the back foot. Regular single legs and attempts to clinch were a lot easier to defend than fence work. When Makhachev doesn’t get a takedown on the fence, he just tries again. Out in the open the effort is greater and the risk is greater. So it was impressive that after four rounds of struggling to make good on single legs, Makhachev shot one more, failed to finish it, shot on the other leg as Poirier scrambled up, and converted that into a takedown with the most left field finish in the single leg arsenal. I have seen this called a big U, a leg whip, and a golf swing, and I’m sure it has a Chinese name because the place you will most often see it is off a caught kick in sanda.
From a mid-level single—with Poirier’s leg pinched between his thighs—Makhachev takes a step back, slides his hands down to Poirier’s ankle and swings the leg in a big “U” shape to take Poirier off his feet. Twenty two minutes into the fight, Makhachev actually fell over as he executed the swing, but he rebounded like a cat and chased Poirier into a front headlock.
Fig. 15
There is room to argue over whether the finish was a D’arce or a Japanese necktie with the D’arce grip. There is more to be said about Makhachev’s hand fighting on the back. And I would love to get into the nitty-gritty of Makhachev’s boxing combinations. But time is off the essence and these moments stood out to this writer as the keys to the story of the fight.
Islam Makhachev is a wonderful fighter. That was already known. Last night his unlikeliest rival dragged him into the most entertaining fight of his dominant career. And yet many of us came away more impressed by Makhachev for the challenge.