Stephen Thompson vs Vicente Luque

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Two Types of Counter Fighter

Working out how to get a great fight out of Stephen ‘Wonderboy’ Thompson is a science still in its early phases. Certainly every match up Thompson has been booked into for the last five years has looked brilliant on paper, and then about half of them turn into stinkers. But when it all comes together, Thompson can humiliate some of the division’s most capable strikers. His most recent victory was a drive-by kickboxing exhibition against Jorge Masvidal, where Thompson was almost untouchable and Masvidal often looked to be fighting off a swarm of bees on one leg in the middle of the cage.

Yet in his last two bouts, Thompson has been at his worst. The tepid match with Darren Till did wonders for Till’s stock and got him rushed into a title shot, but didn’t help Thompson’s reputation as a dull competitor. Most recently, Thompson took on Anthony Pettis who was moving up to welterweight in yet another attempt at a career renaissance. Some good low kicks bothered Thompson but a superman punch off the fence caught the point fighter just right and scored Pettis a knockout and, somehow a position in the welterweight top five.

So here comes Vicente Luque: seemingly everything a fight fan should want and yet with finish after finish he has struggled to break into the UFC’s welterweight rankings or into public consciousness. Like Thompson, his best work is done on the counter. Unlike Thompson, Luque is an offensive counterpuncher, meaning that he goes forward and pressures the opponent in an attempt to draw out poorly thought out attacks which he can arc bombs over the top of.

Thompson’s best work as a counter fighter is done against aggressive opponents and forward movement more than by picking off or reacting to individual strikes. He particularly enjoys the kind of opponent who isn’t going to cut the ring but is instead going to turn to face him every time he hits them and steps out the side door. Thompson is a master of this “v-stepping” and it is more of a principle than a single technique. We examined it in Stick and Move: The Meaning of Angles.

Thompson enters on one line and leaves on another so that each engagement ends up being a step past the opponent to the other side of the cage as much as it is a legitimate attack. In this way Thompson frustrated Jorge Masvidal enormously. Every time Masvidal got Thompson close to the fence, Thompson would pop him in the nose and be out in the open again while Masvidal blinked the water from his eyes.

While we consider Thompson a bursting sort of counter striker, he has some surprisingly neat boxing when he shows it off. It isn’t textbook, by any means, but he will hang his head out as bait and pull away to score check hooks. Additionally, Thompson is one of the few men in MMA using the rear handed straight to the body with any degree of success. He will score it when his opponent is squaring up along the cage—as when he met the notorious fence loiterer, Tyron Woodley—but he is also presented the opportunity for it by opponents who bring their guard up high to compensate for his speed in getting in to hit the head. You could perhaps see this brought to bear a fair amount against Vicente Luque because, if you recall his fight with Bryan Barbarena, Luque’s go-to defensive posture is to put on the earmuffs and square up.

A Wonderboy fight is often dictated by where the action unfolds. Tyron Woodley put himself on the fence and made Thompson come to him—taking away the risk of walking onto Thompson as he moved to intercept. From Kyoji Horiguchi to Michael Page to Lyoto Machida, part of being a wicked point fighter in MMA is being pretty quick, and part of it is timing the opponent as they step in so that you seem inhumanly quick. Robert Whittaker and Jorge Masvidal tried to work Thompson towards the fence to cut off his straight retreat, and when they had him close to the cage they did much better work—particularly Masvidal with his body kicks and low kicks. For Luque cutting the cage could make or break this fight.

Out in the open is where Thompson’s feints and movement will deceive. Luque is familiar with this because Leon Edwards absolutely confounded him with the feinting game at range—making all of Luque’s counterpunching chops worthless as he second guessed himself and took his finger off the trigger. If Luque can begin to crowd Thompson towards the fence he can not only remove Thompson’s retreat, but also square Thompson up as the point fighter leaves his stance to side step—taking away the jamming side kick and the threat of the quick round kick or hook kick. Additionally Luque has a decent low and body kicking game, and has used short takedowns along the fence to work his way towards his one-size-fits-all ground game which revolves around the D’arce choke.

The problem is that Thompson has something that is still greatly lacking in MMA: he knows where he is in the cage at all times. He will occasionally get caught against the fence based on being distracted or making a misstep, but generally Thompson doesn’t get caught in the habit of only circling off the fence once he has already hit it.

Obviously, we cannot write off the possibility that Thompson gets caught coming in with one of Luque’s marvellous cross counters or a short left hook to close the door. That could very well happen. But everything about Thompson’s game is set up so that it doesn’t. The feints, the long needling shots, the V-steps and seldom throwing more than one shot at a time, the jamming kicks. Every moment of Thompson’s game is savouring the open space of the cage and avoiding the temptation to rush. Luque finding a way to fluster him and force mistakes or exchanges seems as though it will be the difference between a step forward for Luque or another Wonderboy Thompson ringcraft clinic.