The Tactical Guide to
Geoff Neal vs Stephen Thompson
When a good nickname is found, combat sports won’t let it be. There are approximately a hundred Pitbulls in MMA, and every variation of “Sugar” or “Suga” has been run up a few times. It certainly doesn’t help that half the fighters called “One Punch” or “Hands of Stone” have a knockout rate that doesn’t much outshine Shinya Aoki’s. Geoff Neal is a happy break with this tradition though: in his five UFC appearances just one man made it to the final bell, and the other four were blown out emphatically. Most recently, Neal gifted Mike Perry his first knockout loss, and Perry for all his flaws and drama is as tough as nails.
It has been a full year but after that incredibly promising start, Geoff Neal can finally return to work this weekend. His UFC run hasn’t been easy—Brian Camozzi, Frank Camacho, Belal Muhammad, Niko Price and Mike Perry—all good fighters. But this time Neal gets a name the fans can actually grab onto: Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson.
Neal’s game is that of most dangerous southpaws, he uses the southpaw double attack to force his opponent into a guessing game. The left straight shoots down the middle, the left round kick comes around the side and both shoot out quick enough that the squaring of his shoulders could mean either is imminent. Slip or reach for the left straight and you might eat the round kick, keep the right hand up for the kick and you might get lanced down the centre by the left straight. It’s a very simple dilemma but you can’t finesse your way around it and it doesn’t just stop working at a certain level of competition. In fact the faster and more explosive the athlete applying it, the more dangerous it becomes.
When Neal puts pressure on his opponents and walks them down to start a fire fight, he is pretty good. He had great success on the regional scene doing this and it is still an integral part of his game which was on full show in his toughest UFC match up against Belal Muhammad. But while Neal can beat people up going forward he does a lot of his best work off the back foot. Following his loss to Kevin Holland in 2017—wherein Neal went forward and tried to land combinations but was often jammed or tied up before he could start swinging properly—Neal has realized that subtlety will get your fist to the other guy’s chin a lot easier than transparent aggression.
Periodically through bouts Neal will back away from his opponent and circle the cage, bouncing in and out of his stance. Right foot going in and then coming back level to his left, over and over. This moving in and out of stance is somewhat reminiscent of Dominick Cruz’s “launchpad” which we discussed at length in Absolute Masterclass: Garbrandt vs Cruz.
Many of Neal’s best connections in recent years have been single shot intercepting counters as as the opponent closes on him. This circling off and bouncing in and out of stance very much sets the trap for these counters. Sometimes Neal will pivot out to an orthodox stance just to jog off and start bouncing between feet-level and southpaw again, his orthodox stance serves no other purpose than to move him around. It is when his opponent closes that—from wherever his feet are—Neal drives into a southpaw stance and connects his left straight. Even Neal’s high kick knockout against Mike Perry came off the back foot. As Perry moved to correct the exaggerated distance he had established between them, Neal threw up the high kick.
This makes Neal an interesting contrast to Stephen Thompson. Neal seems to prefer fighting on the lead and pressing forward, but when he relieves pressure and allows his opponent to come to him he does some of his best work. Thompson fights evasively for the most part and takes some real convincing to press the fight on the lead.
Thompson’s last fight was against Vicente Luque in November of 2019 so he’s accrued as much ring rust as Neal at least. That fight became a Wonderboy clinic in the second half as Luque obliged Thompson by following him around the cage at just the right pace to be fed a diet of straight punches and side kicks with beautiful V-stepping entrances and exits. But even Luque’s worst moments in that fight still showed exactly why Thompson is reluctant to really get stuck in on offence. Just as Thompson believed he had Luque hurt enough to open up with three or four punches, Luque would crack him with a left hook on the return. Luque was a step behind for much of the fight but just through being the last man to throw on every exchange he still gave Thompson a handful of scares.
Hypothetical Gameplans
Part of the difficulty Neal faces in this fight is getting Thompson to hang around long enough to hit. If he simply follows Thompson around the cage, Thompson will dart in and out. If he can create effective pressure and cut the cage, he’s still going to face Thompson trying to hit once and get out the side door, he’s just going to be able to force when it happens. While the intercepting left straight is Neal’s weapon of choice for good reason, his right hook is an underrated little shot that could help him tremendously in this one. Any time Thompson enters or Neal finds himself a day late and a dollar short on an exchange, he would do well to cover, throw the right hook, and follow with a left kick to the legs or even head if he’s feeling especially cheeky.
While it isn’t quite the same shot, Luque’s right hand across the top of Thompson’s jab often sent Wonderboy stumbling just because he fights so long and so bladed. This was the same night that Kevin Lee scored a cross counter and stepped up into a high kick on Gregor Gillespie as Gillespie lost his balance. The opening was there for Luque, Neal’s counter right hook might be used to create that same opening.
When he’s fighting on the back foot Neal will create exaggerated distances and then move to close them at the same time as his opponent—creating that illusion of being even faster than he actually is. But when Neal is working on the lead he makes sure to tighten the distance up before beginning his attacks. It is hard to see him doing this reliably against a man as conscious of distance and positioning as Thompson. The two key things Neal can do to give himself a better chance of repeatedly getting in position to score on Thompson are to firstly use the fence to corral Thompson before engaging and secondly strike to hurt his movement first—focusing on low kicks and body work. This second one is a bit of a departure from Neal’s A game because he is almost entirely a head hunter and he has had terrific success doing it.
While Thompson hasn’t had a disastrous loss because of these methods yet, they do provably work against him. Jorge Masvidal was finding success with low kicks and body kicks though he tended to just follow Thompson around the cage and fight out of an overly defensive shell. Vicente Luque—in what was otherwise a very impressive performance from Thompson—trapped Thompson against the cage several times in the first round and really hammered his legs. The way that Thompson turned the fight around was by cracking Luque with hard counters as he stepped up to kick. One hint that it was troubling Thompson was his change of behaviour: in that first round he sought clinches, picked up a single leg, and threw winging overhands to try and throw Luque off before settling Luque down with some meaningful connections in the second round.
For Thompson to work against Neal, there is already something of a blueprint out there. Kevin Holland is a bit taller and longer than Thompson but he found remarkable success with the side kick to the midsection against Neal. This is because despite his love of the left straight and left round kick, Neal fights pretty square on. By already having his shoulders almost square and closing the distance to almost an arms reach, Neal can get his left to the target that little bit faster. But obviously the side kick is much longer than Neal’s left straight and can cut inside the line of his round kick.
The difference is that Thompson only occasionally uses his side kick as an offensive weapon. Where Kevin Holland was bounding up into power side kicks, Thompson tends to use the “D-side”, a stopping side kick straight out of the stance that jams the opponent’s forward movement. Though Thompson is a crafty fighter he has never seemed the sort to ruthlessly exploit an opening if it means deviating from his usual methods and his comfort zone. I would expect to see the side kick work well as a check, intermittently, but not be exploited to its full extent to exhaust and stop Neal as Holland did. But even if Thompson only uses the side kick as the occasional stopper, it would still pair well with his round kick and hook kick. Neal’s hands immediately dropped to cover the side kick even before Holland had established it.
As Thompson does the majority of his lead leg kicking from southpaw and that means a closed guard match up, expect that sneaky turn over into round kick that he used several times against Johnny Hendricks. Even without that Bill Wallace trinity of side kick, hook kick and round kick that all look alike, Holland’s side kick was such a nuisance that his biggest moments of the fight and the knockout itself came off raising his knee and gliding in with a fake.
But even taking the side kick off the table altogether, we are actually talking about a larger hole in Neal’s game. He doesn’t really have an answer to body shots and he presents the target as he tries to close the distance. The side kick is perfect because it is long and jamming, but a good rear leg front kick works just as well, as do body punches.
Belal Muhammad’s best success against Neal came from changing levels and swinging in good punches to the body. This was somewhat counter-intuitive because the last thing you want to do when you’re losing on speed and power is start putting yourself in range to punch the body. Yet in that fight, Neal’s response to the body blows went from trying to punch back to simply crunching over and trying to absorb them. Thompson is not a great body hitter, but he has made great use of rear handed straights to the body throughout his fights. A good right or left straight to the solar plexus might be exactly the sort of weapon to turn Neal from actively pressuring forward to slowly following Thompson around.
Stephen Thompson seems to have settled into his role as the gatekeeper. A gatekeeper so tricky that for a lot of title contenders it is best to pretend that he doesn’t exist. If Thompson bags an impressive win over Neal, he will have another chance to edge back into the title picture after his post-Woodley exile. If Neal can pull off the victory, expect the UFC to strap a rocket to this man and fly him to the moon.