Oliveira vs Gaethje -

The Slacky Breakdown

Charles Oliveira’s Mix Up

The main event between Charles Oliveira and Justin Gaethje lived up to the hype as the two took lumps of each other and the fight lasted less than a full round. This was effectively the usual Oliveira fight formula, where he goes out to break his opponent with variety and pace while also putting himself in tremendous danger at all times, but cranked up to the nth degree as he tried to get pushy with the division’s biggest counter puncher.

Charles Oliveira’s upright punching form means that his punching mechanics look lovely. It can also be conducive to hitting power as his shoulders are rotating cleanly on top of his hips, but it does make him a bit of a mark for looping blows, especially early on in a fight. Last night Oliveira got chinned across the top of his left hook or collar tie with right hands at multiple points in the early going. While he went to his back on two occasions there is that degree of Werdum-like uncertainty in his opponents: he could be hurt badly, he could be hurt only a little, and either way trying to finish him from within his guard is a hassle to put it lightly. Here it seemed as though Oliveira’s choice to drop to his back gave him some pause and allowed him to escape a follow up exchange on the feet.  

Oliveira’s tactics were sound even if he was getting drubbed early. He immediately began poking Gaethje’s body with push kicks and he often looked to enter behind a raised knee to mitigate the threat of the calf kick. But most importantly he played a game that first punished Gaethje for dropping his head, and then doubly punished him if he kept himself upright.  

In every exchange Oliveira attempted to snap Gaethje’s head down and threaten a choke or a front headlock. This was an elegant way around having the ground fighting advantage but not the same wrestling pedigree as Gaethje. The strategy also played off Oliveira’s height advantage.  It was wrestling and tiring a man without having to dive at his legs or grind along the fence. This focus on exaggerating Gaethje’s tendency to duck and stoop also played into Oliveira’s long standing love of uppercuts, knees to the body and elbows while holding behind the head.

In addition to being the shorter man, Gaethje’s style involves dropping his head a lot. Not just in punching exchanges either, watch his fight with Michael Johnson and you will notice that Gaethje does a lot of his takedown defence by blocking the opponent’s head with his own. Gaethje’s head movement also allowed Oliveira to feint him into a lean and hit him in the body with a front kick early in the round: a great counter to any man with tricky head movement.  

In Figure 1 Oliveira is walking Gaethje down and Gaethje slips his head inside and goes to throw a right hand across the top, but Oliveira has backed off (b). As Gaethje weaves his head back to the centre (c), Oliveira kicks him in the body with ball of his foot (d).

Fig. 1

All this pulling down on Gaethje’s head paired with Oliveira’s straight right. If Gaethje forcibly kept his head up, he was more of a mark for the straight right inside of his wider left hooks and overhands. Oliveira clipped Gaethje with some textbook right straights as Gaethje circled out of loose clinches as in Figure 2.

This was something that Oliveira did multiple times against Kevin Lee—he would reach for a collar tie and as Lee ducked his head out and circled off, Oliveira would pitch a right straight just in time to catch his head coming up. Figure 2 shows a perfect sequence of Oliveira tactics: he enters with a flying knee (a) and uses this additional height advantage to come down over the top of Gaethje and snap the American down into his armpit where he can threaten chokes (b). As Gaethje shucks his head free and begins circling out away from the clinch (c), arms outstretched and in no position to punch back (d), Oliveira hammers him with the right straight (e).

Fig. 2

But Oliveira’s textbook left hook was largely absent. This was especially noticeable as it has been a staple of his recent career. It seemed clear that Oliveira’s team had decided hooking with another hooker was going to be tricky, and when Oliveira did throw the hook instinctively, he tended to get caught on the return.

Instead, Oliveira had most success by skipping the left hook altogether and when his left hand did go forth it was sent directly to the back of Gaethje’s neck to seize a collar tie, without the thud with which it normally arrives.

In recent years Oliveira has used a stamping left hook—raising his left knee and then dropping it in range with his foot toed in, to throw a textbook left hook as he comes down as in Figure 3.

Fig. 3

This is Oliveira’s tricky prevention and / or counter to the calf kick and after watching the other fights on this card, the rest of the fighters in the UFC could do with adopting it. In this though, bout he mainly used the same entry to stamp his way into the collar tie as in Figure 4.

Fig. 4

The finish came as a perfect right straight dropped Gaethje and Oliveira ran to get on Gaethje’s back, threatening first a rear triangle, before resetting the back position as Gaethje scrambled up and scoring the choke. After all the drama of the previous day, and losing his title on the scale due to a slip in his professionalism, it was great to see Oliveira handle such a dangerous fighter so masterfully.  

Trinaldo vs Roberts

In last week’s Filthy Casual’s Guide to Francisco Trinaldo we explored the idea of Trinaldo as a gatekeeper. A gatekeeper in the best and most dramatic sense: his strengths can prove overwhelming, but his flaws are deep set and at this point it seems like he will not find a way to reliably hide them over.

One of Trinaldo’s career defining shortcomings has been his lack of commitment to right handed hitting. He will flash a double jab with no intention of connecting, or flick a lean-back right hook—but it all only serves to connect the left hand, and the right-handed attacks are so unconvincing that they only serve to announce the impending arrival of the overhand left. In Danny Roberts, Trinaldo was also meeting a fellow southpaw—the type of fighter he has always been worst against. Against a southpaw, Trinaldo is returned to a closed stance match-up and is denied of his exoticism. When the fight is southpaw vs southpaw, everything is back to jabbing and lead hooking and set ups are the key to scoring with the power hand: all things he refuses to do.  

Yet as the president of the Massaranduba fan club, I cannot help wishing this Danny Roberts fight had happened sooner because in round one, Trinaldo actually sat down on a jab and caught Roberts square in the mouth. This writer knew better than to hope for this to be the beginning of a real commitment to jabbing, and Trinaldo soon went back to his usual strategy of trying to cross over Roberts’ jab with his overhand left.

In Figure 5, Roberts shows why Trinaldo has so much trouble hurting southpaws. Even when Roberts got clubbed with the left hand his instinctual reaction to turn away to his left put him down behind his lead shoulder and he was either missed the brunt of the blow or rolled it off.

Fig. 5

And then after he bit his mouthpiece through two good clubbing lefts in the second round, Trinaldo smote him with a jab that shot straight down through his legs and had him doing the chicken dance.

Fig. 6

While the jab should open the door for powerful swings of the rear hand, the relationship can be inverted. The wide, committed broadsides of Trinaldo had Roberts crouching down behind the shield of his lead shoulder and it was the right jab—the thing Roberts would have to worry about most against a good boxer—that poked in completely unobstructed.

There was a good deal of rolling around after Trinaldo hurt Roberts, because Trinaldo is a great hitter but also a serious fumbler when the finish seems ripe. But in the third round Trinaldo returned to jabbing confidently and snappily—scoring it successfully against an opponent with a couple of inches of height and four inches of reach on him. And so I say I wish this fight had happened sooner because had round two of this fight played out eight years earlier, Trinaldo might have come to realise what he had been missing out on and started pumping that thing out there sooner.

The Trinaldo classics we covered in A Filthy Casual’s Guide were also present though. Trinaldo connected with multiple gut-munching left uppercuts and wide lefts to the body. While both men were southpaw and so this should have been the mirror of a regular orthodox vs orthodox match up, it is also important to remember that the vulnerable portion of the liver hangs down the right side of the body. This is interesting to keep in mind after Rob Font hammered in a hundred wide rights to Chito Vera’s body last weekend and they seemed to leave no lasting impact on the fight.

Fig. 7

As with his left hands to the head, Trinaldo found success not because of his combination work, but rather through sneaky set ups and exploitation of openings. He scored the left hand to the body underneath Roberts’ jab as a counter in the same way that he threw the left hand to the head over it. One of his best body shots in this fight came as he used a trick from Rocky Marciano’s playbook you will sometimes see called the “blind right.” In Rocky’s case he would do his usual mauling work on the inside and then, when out in the open again, duck in with his eye on his opponent’s midriff as if to come in to do more infighting, but as he did so he would swing a right hand all the way overhead. In Trinaldo’s case, he ducked in and threw himself onto his lead foot as if to swing his overhand—as he had already done a dozen times in this round—and instead dug the left to the body. Though it perhaps can’t be called a “blind” right because the surprise was the blow actually landing where he was looking!

Fig. 8

Finally, Trinaldo was able to stun Roberts in the third round with a counter punch we discussed in A Filthy Casual’s Guide. As Roberts came in on Trinaldo along the fence, Trinaldo performed a quarter turn pivot to his left—what would be considered the “inside angle” against an orthodox opponent—as he winged in his left hand. This is a neat little counter that allows a fighter to move to his left while taking his head off line to the right, and Trinaldo did well with it against the tricky Ross Pearson.

Fig. 9

Royval vs Schnell

You might have noticed the champ-not-champ Charles Oliveira attacked a reverse triangle from the back in the main event, a thoroughly new-fangled attack and one that Gordon Ryan has done some damage with in recent years. But on the undercard Brandon Royval demonstrated a couple of other new meta Jiu Jitsu tactics in his quick win over Matt Schnell.

Fig. 10

Figure 10 shows the high-low principle in action. After getting knocked down early—as he is wont to do—Royval used Schnell’s hands being on the mat to attack an omaplata (a). Schnell, taking his knee off the ground, began posturing up (b): a great way to steer clear of or escape most upper body submissions from within the guard. The current no-gi trend is to attack the upper body when the opponent stays low, in order to expose the lower body as they are forced to stand or posture up. As Schnell popped his arm free of the omaplata, Royval gable gripped his hands behind Schnell’s knee (c) and spun over into a calf slicer which he used to sweep and get on top.

Then Royval jumped on a guillotine from top position and as he dropped to his back you could see that Danaher principle of “double enclosure.” Notice that in frame (b) of Figure 11 below, Royval’s choking hand is all the way through to Schnell’s collar bone. His arm is encircling Schnell’s neck rather than drawing the wrist up into the front of Schnell’s throat. Gordon Ryan has been finishing opponents with this one handed guillotine and an overhook, and Royval managed to elicit the submission from Schnell while still in the process of bringing his left hand in to augment the one handed choke.

Fig. 11

Leal vs Cooper III

While five women’s lightweight fights in a night might seem like a tough ask, PFL’s card this week was saved by a compelling—if lop-sided—contest between Ray Cooper III and Carlos Leal. Cooper has earned himself a handsome nest egg, having won the last two PFL welterweight tournaments outright, but on Saturday night he found himself recast in the part of anvil: with Leal in the starring role as the hammer. By the end of the bout Cooper had landed less than twenty-five strikes, whilst Leal had scored well over a hundred. The bout seemed to hover always on the edge of being halted and a TKO awarded, but Cooper was able to do just enough to courageously prolong his beating.

Cooper is a respectable hitter, able to belt with both hands, but for almost all of this bout found himself in the classic dilemma of always being too close or too far away to connect with his entirely mid-range focused arsenal. Leal meanwhile switched between orthodox and southpaw, pounding the lead leg when he was in closed stance, and pounding the arm and body when he found his way to open stance.

But the meat of Leal’s hitting was done in the clinch and it was once again another beautiful showing for the head post. We reiterate it after every slightly successful clinch performance but head position dictates striking ability in the clinch. No one hits well chest-to-chest so some space has to be made, and the best way to do that without breaking from the clinch entirely is to use your skull as a brace and back your hips up. When pushing into the fence, the head post allows the inside fighter to force his opponent into an upright, unathletic position, while getting his hips behind his shoulders into much more advantageous kneeing position. If UFC 274 left you feeling a little short changed, this one might just cheer you up a bit. I have included the British Youtube version from Channel 4.