Rodtang versus Haggerty: The Rematch

Rodtang’s “Ironman” moniker could well be to do with his remarkable ability—and willingness—to absorb punishment. He has taken the hardest shots from the division’s hardest hitters and responded by slapping his own face and calling for seconds. But Rodtang’s Muay Thai career could just as easily be likened to the endurance race: he has fought an astonishing 311 fights to this point and he is just twenty two years old. To put that in perspective, Buakaw is thirty seven and has 275 bouts to his name. Saenchai—who seems to fight every other weekend at the age of 39—has 344. Suakim, the three time Lumpinee champion, is closer to being Rodtang’s peer at twenty four years old and has 129 fights under his belt. You will struggle to find anyone who has squeezed as many fights into such as short time on this earth as Rodtang. There is scarcely time for anything else, he lives and breathes the fight.

Of those 311 fights, the two you will most likely recall are Tenshin Nasukawa in RISE and Jonathan Haggerty in ONE. Rodtang fought Tenshin in June 2018 and put the young star through the ringer. Where Suakim had drawn out some of Tenshin’s worse habits over a long but slow paced fight, Rodtang stormed into the fray and exhausted the Japanese wunderkind—shrugging off clean blows from a seriously gifted power puncher. The early going showed Tenshin’s habit of simply trying to punch his way out of trouble when backed towards the ropes, and by the later rounds Tenshin was in full time wasting mode—taking Rodtang down off kicks and throwing himself to the mat with rolling thunder attempts before getting back up as slowly as the referee would allow him. Tenshin was given the decision but very few were convinced.

Then in August 2019, Rodtang met Jonathan Haggerty for the ONE bantamweight title. The two were polar opposites in experience: Haggerty had just eighteen fights to his name when they met. Yet Haggerty has the kind of comfort under fire and kicking dexterity that you wouldn’t take as a given in a Nak Muay with over a hundred fights.

Good fights are often made by changes of momentum and those are impossible if a fighter collapses when things aren’t going his way. Rodtang got pinned down and beaten up at range by Haggerty’s kicking game, but Haggerty was also bullied on the inside and knocked down by punches. Both men snatched back momentum after it was swinging against them, and it made for one of the best striking matches of 2019.

The let down of the whole thing was that many felt it was a good example of a draw—three rounds to Haggerty, but Rodtang scored a knockdown. Yet ONE has a bizarre policy of scoring Muay Thai and kickboxing bouts apparently on a ten point must system but also forbidding draws. This makes even less sense when you recall that they have announced majority decisions in the past. But gripes with ONE’s policies aside, Rodtang won a hard fought decision and became the ONE bantamweight Muay Thai champion.

Rodtang’s usual method is to walk the opponent to the boundary, using quick inside low kicks and switch kicks, and then to start swinging punches from there. In some ways Rodtang brings to mind the stories about Harry Greb. Greb was an overwhelming pressure fighter who didn’t finish many of his opponents, but he did tend to have them fighting for survival through the entire fight. Rodtang hits hard and applies great pressure, but doesn’t tend to finish an awful lot of fights. His 2018 fight with Sergio Wielzen sums this up perfectly. There was seldom a moment where Wielzen wasn’t stumbling around the cage and desperately trying to keep Rodtang off him, and yet he made it to the final bell.

Wielzen’s use of push kicks also makes a perfect contrast to Haggerty’s. Rodtang’s chin won’t hold up forever but with over three hundred fights in the bag, you probably don’t want to be relying on being the one to break it. Therefore, fighting Rodtang means using distance and avoiding inside exchanges. The teep / thip is the traditional way to point score at range and bar the advances of an opponent, but as with the jab there is a lot more to it than just having good mechanics. Wielzen was trying to pick his leg up and jam his foot into Rodtang’s stomach each time Rodtang advanced, and was getting his leg caught or parried as a result—after which Rodtang would enter with a gut munching right straight to the body.

Haggerty, meanwhile, was able to pin Rodtang down at range with his excellent use of knee raises and stance switches to fake Rodtang out. In addition to pairing the push kicks and the threat of the high kick, Haggerty also used the teep and the feigned teep to step in on punches. You don’t have to be the bigger puncher to get an opponent to respect that weapon and to benefit from using it. Had Haggerty just been trying to push kick Rodtang off him—instead of using it to obscure other attacks in between controlling the distance—he probably would have been another easy mark for Rodtang to walk down.

Haggerty’s feints and rhythm manipulation kept Rodtang off his game in the first two rounds.

The unexpected challenge for Rodtang as ONE champion was Walter Goncalves who took the Thai to a split decision in October. The reaction to that fight in much of the community was predictable—Goncalves was a coward for not standing and fighting with Rodtang and should have been penalised for timidity—even though he was striking with the intention to hurt pretty much the entire time. That is why fighting is a sport and those fairground punching bag machines that measure your power are not: in a fight you are allowed to use your god-given attributes, and the opponent is allowed to try and make it so that you cannot.

Obviously, Goncalves’ performance was is not to be held up as the ideal—there was a bit much Shinya Aoki style jumping to the mat whenever he was in trouble—but it is often in underwhelming victories that you learn the most about what troubles a great fighter. Goncalves was able to circle the cage and return on Rodtang’s kicks with big swings, and then run out on an angle. This is an intriguing factor in the upcoming Haggerty rematch: Tapology at least lists this event as using a cage, where their first fight was held in a ring. Obviously a large, circular cage is a lot easier to circle than a ring—where the corners serve as a trap.

As Rodtang closed, Goncalves was also able to do a somewhat wild version of what Haggerty’s corner were asking for in the first fight—clip off an elbow and close to the clinch. The last thing a fighter wants to be doing is trading punches with Rodtang with their back to the boundary, whether that’s a fence or ropes.

Ultimately what made the first Rodtang – Haggerty match so brilliant was that each man was able to get his game going at some point, but not able to keep it going throughout. So slight adjustments on either end could lead to a more decisive result in the rematch. Additionally, both men made miscalculations in the first fight which likely stemmed from the close, competitive nature of it. It was not in Haggerty’s interest to trade with Rodtang at points, and doing this allowed Rodtang into the fight in moments where Haggerty could have been piling up points from the outside or at least denying Rodtang offence.

For Rodtang, there is a very obvious line between his gamesmanship and genuine frustration. After he had dropped Haggerty, Haggerty was able to circle out and Rodtang made the classic mistake of trying to play to the referee, the crowd and the judges instead of keeping up the pressure. This has been even more noticeable in his recent fights in the cage—where cutting the opponent off can be like trying to catch a greased eel with barbecue tongs. The most important point—and one we reiterate every time a pressure fighter gets frustrated by an evasive opponent—is that no matter the ruleset and how likely the judges are to award displays of machismo, there is never a time where letting up the pressure and trying to appeal to the opponent’s masculinity is actually worthwhile: it is lost time and when the opponent is hurt it is a lost opportunity.

Another point worth noting for Rodtang is that his body work was often absent at key moments in the first fight. You will notice him enter behind crushing body shots against Wielzen, and in his absolute trouncing of Sok Thy he relied heavily on the left hook to the liver—particularly of the right leg feint, a Buakaw favourite. Getting to Haggerty’s body is as important to limit his movement as it is to slow his ability to pick his knees up and kick. In the first fight, Rodtang often treated each successful attempt at closing the distance like perhaps the one chance he would get to knock Haggerty’s head off. In fact, Rodtang’s near knockout in the fourth round came as a result of entering with body shots off a Haggerty teep. With Haggerty wincing along the ropes, Rodtang dropped the Brit with a quick 3-2 to the noggin. When Haggerty got up, it was as though Rodtang forgot the body work even happened and suddenly he was head hunting exclusively.

A gorgeous entry to the body work from Rodtang

Obviously Haggerty’s distance game had troubled Rodtang in a way that many of his opponents haven’t been able to, but losing sight of his terrific body work for long periods of the bout meant that Haggerty was still able to move and stay safe in the fifth round after what had been a pretty disastrous fourth.

While I slag off the ring whenever a Rizin card rolls around, my reasons for disliking it are almost entirely to do with the way that it becomes a hazard and a complication to the action in grappling exchanges. I cannot help but feel the cage—particularly it’s lack of corners—can work to the detriment of a kickboxing or Muay Thai match. While Goncalves put in a surprisingly good showing against Rodtang and might have even deserved the decision, the size and space of the cage undoubtedly served as a handicap to Rodtang in that bout. Having re-examined the Sergio Wielzen fight there is little doubt in this writer’s mind that the cage saved Wielzen: there were periods where he escaped Rodtang by running sideways with his butt pressed against the fence, something which would quickly carry him into a corner in the ring.

Whatever the case, this rematch is one of the reasons it is worth tolerating all the ballyhoo that comes as part of the ONE Championship package. ONE hit on a great fight and they decided to get the rematch together within six months of the first. No one else is putting these two men on such a big stage and offering them big bucks for it. Add to that the presence of Liam Harrison, Muangthai and Stamp Fairtex and you might forget how slow this week was looking in the MMA world.