Leon Edwards Breakdown: Sharpshooter

[The MM Analyst]

The fighting career of Leon Edwards has paralleled his life, characterized by adversity and punctuated with triumph. Growing up amidst a culture of crime that took his father’s life and promised to imperil his own, Edwards instead chose another path. At his mother’s urging, a teenage Edwards joined an MMA gym and never looked back.

His story is a great example of the power of sport to provide the structure, affirmation, and support youth need to transform their lives. And now he’s become a role model not only to those brought up as he was, but to an entire country after becoming the first UK champion to win a UFC title without moving his camp abroad.

But the path to the belt for Edwards was anything but smooth. After putting together a win streak spanning eight fights and three years, Edwards got a big break when he was scheduled to fight Tyron Woodley one fight removed from losing his belt - the lowest risk, highest reward fight in the entire division. But his big breakthrough moment was not to be, as COVID-19 forced Edwards to pull out; this theme would soon recur ad nauseam.

After more than a year without activity, Edwards was removed from his #3 spot in the UFC Welterweight rankings in what seemed like a move to force him to accept a fight well below his station with Khamzat Chimaev, as his ranking was reinstated the very next day once the fight was announced. But the Chimaev fight would be cancelled three times due to COVID complications, pushing Edwards’ hiatus as far as 602 days.

While he was sitting out, Edwards had to watch Jorge Masvidal, Gilbert Burns, Jorge Masvidal again, and Colby Covington all get undeserved shots at Kamaru Usman’s Welterweight title. And his long awaited return to the Octagon ended in a tragicomic no contest to late-notice replacement, Belal Muhammad, due to an Edwards eye poke. At that point almost two years of Edwards’ prime had been wasted by COVID and bad luck. In a sport like MMA where most athletes only get a small window where career trajectory and matchmaking align, that could have spelled the end for his championship dreams.

Edwards finally got another break when he was given Nate Diaz as a gimme fight in what would end up thrusting him into a title shot against Kamaru Usman. But the sailing wasn’t smooth from there either. After a hot start, Edwards began falling apart in the later rounds, seemingly intent on allowing Usman to force his strengths uncontested. It got so bad that the commentators even speculated he had accepted defeat, holding on for the moral victory of losing a decision. Mere seconds after that call, Edwards launched one of the most shocking knockouts in the sport’s history, felling Usman with a picture perfect head kick.
After a brutal slog to the title, down three rounds to one in what would likely be his last chance, Edwards changed his life. A single minute stood between crushing defeat and triumph. It wasn’t that he never wavered - he spent the entire fight wavering. It was all he could do to keep himself just hanging on, but in the end that was enough. It never broke him. And once victory balanced on the thinnest of margins, Leon Edwards finally executed, once again emerging through the hardship having accomplished what seemed impossible.

Edwards quickly grew into his new role as Welterweight champion, fixing everything that went wrong for him against Usman in an immediate rematch. His reign has shown no signs of slowing down since then, as he followed it up with an easy win over Colby Covington. Without further ado, let’s dig into the techniques and tactics that make Leon Edwards such a unique and dangerous fighter.

Southpaw Slickster​

A quick look at Edwards’ stance makes it clear that he prioritizes powerful strikes off his rear side. He sets up in a wide stance with his rear leg behind him, ready to push off into powerful rear kicks and straight punches at a moment’s notice. Figure 1 demonstrates Edward’s wide stance.


Fig. 1

To an opponent standing on the other end of him, that wide, set stance generates a lot of threat, as he appears immediately ready to feed them a powerful left hand or shin whenever they think about stepping in. But it also highlights his preference for pot-shotting over exchanging. His hips tend to stay centered for the most part, which keeps him in position to kick at any time, but the lack of hip fold and the width of his stance make pocket exchanges awkward.

Edwards camps out an extra step away from his opponent, where either man would need to take a deep step in to land a clean punch. This distance management serves as his main line of defense - on the outside, he can dazzle his opponent with his speed and setups, where their attacks become a lot more predictable and easier for him to read.

A big part of what makes Edwards so effective from a range where most fighters become predictable in their attack is his shrewd feints. When an orthodox striker fights a long southpaw, often they’ll resort to flashing their lead hand and pumping their jab ineffectually, but the long distance in front of them means their opponent can sit back and avoid biting on the feints, since they’re not close enough for the feints to carry threat. Then when their real attack comes, it’s telegraphed by a deep forward step or a level change.

The feints Edwards throws out look exactly like his real strikes. He’ll quickly turn his shoulders as if throwing his rear hand, or flick his rear hip forward and bend his knee like he’s initiating a rear kick. Often he’ll cover the opponent’s lead hand with his own while feinting his rear side with his hips and shoulders, forcing the opponent to key in on his feints and removing a possible entry for them.



Constant hip and shoulder feints serve to desensitize his opponents, who eventually have to stop reacting to every one to conserve their energy and avoid tipping their hand. But that’s what allows Edwards to be effective with single strikes, as once they stop reacting, he can pelt them with a hard kick or blast his straight left down the middle. The feints also enforce his preferred distance. His opponents usually look to close distance, but a quick shoulder twitch will make them think twice about stepping onto him.

At a high level, heavy strikes thrown on the lead need to be disguised in some way to consistently succeed. For aggressive fighters, combinations often play a major part in setting up strikes, with the first few punches serving to hide the power punches that end the combination. But for pot-shotters like Edwards who mainly work in single strikes or two-strike combinations, a bit more finesse is required. Since they lack the benefit of tossing away a few punches to set up a clean shot, one of the best ways to ensure their strikes land clean is to make them look like other strikes. Pairing strikes with similar preliminary motions is a classic method for conservative strikers to hide their offense without exposing themselves to damage.

The southpaw double attack is probably the most famous example of a pairing that exploits similar preliminary motions. The concept is simple - the southpaw’s rear strait and head kick both start with a slight step forward and a turn of the hips and shoulders, but defending them demands different placement of the opponent’s rear hand. The straight draws the rear hand out in front of the chin to parry it, while the head kick draws it up by the ear. Once both strikes have been established, the opponent is left guessing where to put their hand and punished for guessing wrong.



Like any dedicated southpaw kicker, Edwards makes liberal use of his rear hand to hide the head kick. This was the move that stole Edwards the Welterweight Championship against Kamaru Usman, drawing out the parry by flashing the rear hand and slamming his shin straight into the open head.

Part of what makes Edwards’ kicks so deadly is their sheer mechanical efficiency. He kicks with very little tell and no wasted movement, and tends to get his shin directly on the jaw rather than kicking with the softer instep. In MMA, power kicks are typically thrown with an exaggerated and telegraphed forward step of the plant leg, but Edwards often whips his leg up from a standstill, making it near impossible to read.



He’ll even slide his lead foot back at an angle as his opponent steps forward outside his lead leg, pivoting to track their movement and throwing the head kick simultaneously. All the opponent sees is his weight moving backwards with no step to give it away, and suddenly his shin in knocking into their head. Kamaru Usman came into their third fight prepared to defend the head kicks, but Edwards still managed to sneak a couple clean ones through by kicking straight from his stance.

A final setup Edwards uses to hide his headkicks is gesturing low before kicking high. Sometimes it’ll come out as an exaggerated level change preceding the head kick, others he’ll simply look low to direct the opponent’s attention before kicking upstairs.



This was the setup he used to hurt and nearly finish Belal Muhammad in their fight. He’ll often stick his rear hand in the opponent’s face as he comes out of his level change as well, adding the threat of the straight as an extra layer concealing the headkick.

Edwards’ body kick benefits from the same advantages as his headkick - concealment from feints, mechanical efficiency, and synergy with his rear hand and head kick.



He’ll occasionally set up a powerful body kick by showing the lead hook and hopping forward into the kick, but for the most part he just throws it naked and lets his feints and the threat of his other weapons do the job of setting it up.

When fighting a fellow southpaw, the shoulder and back get in the way of his rear kick and his weapons have to change slightly. He emphasizes leg kicks more and becomes more active with his jab, using it to enforce his distance while keeping up the hip and shoulder feints to hide his leg kick. For a fighter who regularly kicks the legs against elite wrestlers, Edwards has been remarkably successful in avoiding kick catches, largely due to his active feints and his tight form. The feints hide the step into the leg kick and the initial turn of the hips and shoulders, and once he’s started the kick, the opponent has very little time to react.



Edwards’ timing also allows him to open up with leg kicks on opponent looking to take him down. His most comprehensive leg-kicking performance came against Colby Covington, where he would time Covington circling to his left and step in to blast powerful leg kicks. The danger of leg kicking a wrestler is that they’ll step in toward the kick, widening their base to jam it and causing the kicking leg to ride up into a takedown. But with Covington’s weight moving away from the kick, he was unable to step toward it and Edwards was free to tee off.

While Edwards is adept at setting up offense and scoring from a long range, most of his opponents are not. By setting such a long distance, he takes a lot of his opponents’ effective tools away and funnels their offense into predictable forms that are easy for him to see coming and avoid. Ideally for Edwards, his man will either try to kick with him at range, in which case they’re drowned by his experience and skill at that distance, or try to rush through the distance where he can easily counter.



Edwards’ defense in the pocket leaves a lot to be desired, but he has a great sense of distance at long range, knowing just how much he needs to pull back to avoid an opponent’s kicks. Fighters trying to kick with him at range usually wind up hitting air, while Edwards continues feinting into scoring blows.

But if his opponent steps in deep to close distance before kicking, Edwards can read the step in and brace for a counter.

So Edwards wants to strand his opponent on the edge of his kicks where he can mix up and disguise his pot shots, while funneling their offense into discrete and easily readable single shots. How then, does he enforce that distance on fighters who are looking to get closer and force him into exchanges? The answer is by investing heavily into sharp first-layer counters.

Once Edwards gets drawn into a boxing exchange, the flaws in his boxing start to show themselves. He stands upright and doesn’t use his hips well on defense, he doesn’t work well in longer combinations, and his footwork isn’t geared toward the subtle adjustment steps and weight transfers of pocket boxing. But he has good eyes for an opponent stepping in on him and is usually ready to meet them with a hard left hand before pivoting or hopping out the side.



Edwards’ counter left works almost like the traditional Karate-style “reverse punch”. The basic idea is that you maintain an extra step of distance so that an orthodox opponent’s jab falls short, meaning they have to take two actions to reach you - step, then punch. If they punch or feint without the step, you can simply ignore it, since they’re too far away. If they go to step and punch, you time the straight left on the forward step, intercepting their punch and giving you a window to sneak out the side door.

Against southpaws, the closed-stance matchup removes that pocket of distance and forces Edwards into more traditional boxing-style counters. He focuses mainly on countering the southpaw’s jab, as that usually precedes their entry into the pocket. By attacking the jab with outside slip counters and pull counters, he can cut off their entry before they trap him in an exchange.



The shoulder feints are a great benefit to his counterpunching against southpaws, serving to draw out their jab so he can punish it. Leon will lean over his lead shoulder and hip, often with his hands down, putting his head right in the path of the jab. But as soon as they take the bait, he pulls his weight back over his lead hip, slipping outside the jab and loading his weight for a big uppercut or straight. One of the key tenets of effective counterpunching is that it becomes much easier if you’re forcing or goading the opponent to throw the kind of punches you want to counter, as it gives you control of the initiative.

With Edwards’ boxing limited mostly to counterpunching, he tends to be quite reactive to feints, and opponents have had success using false entries to draw out reactions.

 

[The MM Analyst]

Fellow southpaws have had the most success with this, as orthodox opponents face the problem of needing to work their way into effective feinting range, lest Edwards keep them an extra step away and ignore any jerky movements. But in a closed stance matchup, the jab becomes an immediate threat and maintaining an extra step of distance is more difficult as you lack the cushy open side to kick into or circle away from, and feints can be used to throw off the timing of Edwards’ counters.

Strong kickers are often best dealt with through aggression and forcing them to move backwards. It is possible to kick effectively on the backfoot, but it becomes more difficult to kick with power if you’re not able to plant your feet and assume a steady stance, and it’s a skillset that nearly nobody in MMA possesses, the level of kicking skill still trailing well below boxing. Some strong kickers like Edson Barboza will chew you up if given space, but simply running at them can force them to abandon their stance and throw off their kicks.

Edwards, however, is an odd sort of MMA kicker. If opponents charge at him, rather than giving ground he’s more than comfortable keeping his feet planted, nailing them with a precision counter, and smoothly sliding out the side door. But if they close distance methodically, keeping their feet underneath them as they advance, he seems to lose composure, forget about his lateral movement, and is more easily backed to the cage.

It’s not a technical or mechanical issue exactly. Edwards rarely uses pivots, the most efficient way to break the line of retreat and avoid backing into the cage, but he’ll circle off to the open side or execute little sidestep shifts to change angles. He’s even totally fine breaking them out to counter and get out of the way of a rushing opponent. But when faced with a steady drip of pressure rather than a torrent, they’re often nowhere to be seen.

If I could speculate on this peculiarity of Edwards’ footwork, I think it’s that he is overwhelmingly fixated on the tactical aspects of fighting over the strategic. The “how” over the “what”. He knows he wants to stay outside jabbing range, and that all his best attacks, counters, and setups flow from that distance. So when an opponent inches forward, his immediate response is to recapture that distance. Sometimes that means a short hop back, sometimes it means an overwrought resetting of his feet that takes him out of position and allows his opponent to eat up more space. The immediate focus is on getting back to the place where his attacks are most effective, and his position in the cage is an afterthought.

Of course, actually putting that gameplan into practice means walking right into Edwards’ best weapons. Strolling right up to the southpaw left straight and body kick is a daunting task, and it often feels safer to stay far away and cover all that distance at once, minimizing the time Edwards can spend smacking you in the face. But all too often in fighting, the best path to victory is paradoxical - maximizing one’s chance of victory often involves accepting risk, rather than avoiding it.

For a fighter like Colby Covington, walking Edwards down could easily get you clobbered, diced up with kicks, or knocked out. But it’s also the best way to force the conditions that Edwards struggles to deal with. And in the Covington fight we saw what the alternative was. Conceding to Edwards’ distance and pace, for most of his opponents, means surrendering their chance of victory.

Edwards’ southpaw opponents have had the most success walking him down due to the closer range of a closed-stance matchup. But it was also a huge factor in the second Usman fight, and the source of much of Edwards’ baffling decision making. Usman would inch closer to him, avoiding any large movements that could expose an easy counter, and Edwards would lose composure, backing himself straight onto the cage or flubbing a large reset and giving up a takedown entry.

The fact that Edwards’ spotty cagecraft and decision making has plagued him throughout his career made his third match with Kamaru Usman all the more notable. He took an incredibly shaky performance in fight two and turned it into a comfortable victory in fight three, not by developing new skills, but simply changing his focus and devoting more attention to broader strategy. The Edwards that fought Usman in their third fight was capable of answering the “what” with just as much detail and precision as the “how”.

Usman likes to cut off the cage and force movement by cheating to an angle. He’ll take a deep L-step or angled hop-step to one side, encouraging his opponent to turn to face him and expose themselves, or give ground so he can eat up space. In their second fight, Edwards would take the bait and back himself to the cage, but in their third contest he started matching Usman’s angle.



When Usman cheated to the side, Edwards would simply execute a sidestep shift, strafing into the opposite stance. Usman would lose his angle of attack, needing to turn to face Edwards and opening up space for Edwards to circle off. Edwards would lead the dance with his shifts too, angling off one way to get Usman committing to a sidestep, before shifting off the other way out of danger. It was a move he had used before tactically to score a quick kick here and there, but the angled shifting became a crucial part of his strategy this time around, allowing him to stay off the cage and maintain his preferred distance.

Ever the tactician, Edwards also seamlessly wove his offense into his shifting footwork:



He’d attack the open-side body kick when shifting into southpaw and the outside leg kick in orthodox. The constant sidestep shifts allowed him to walk Usman into his kicks, juking one way and shifting out the side to get him overcommitting to a step that carried him right into the kick. As the fight went on Edwards’ movement patterns made Usman hesitant to pressure by presenting different looks - he was never quite sure what leg would be coming at him or where he was positioned relative to Edwards.

Edwards’ performance in the third Usman fight also highlighted an important principle of outside fighting. The key to effective distance management isn’t just staying away, but knowing when it’s time to close distance and doing it on your own terms. Playing keep away forever is impossible unless your opponent has poor footwork or the skill gap is so large that you can pop him whenever he tries to step toward you. Against any serious challenge, there will be moments where an outfighter has to deal with close quarters, and the best among them know how to make sure those engagements happen on favorable terms.

In their second fight, Edwards performed excellently in open-space clinch engagements, but most of the clinching took place with Edwards’ back on the cage, where Usman could pin him in place and work to secure a takedown. This was another issue that Edwards fixed simply by changing his focus. After winning the second fight, he had the confidence to hold his ground or step in when Usman pressed, ensuring the clinch happened in open space where Edwards was most effective.

Edwards played an effective all-the-way-in-or-out game. When Usman got close to cornering him and looked to step in, Edwards would stand his ground, extend his arms, and look for collar tie knees. He was so successful in open space clinch exchanges that he later started backing Usman off by just showing a reach for his head.

When Usman managed to trap him against the cage in the second fight, he would throw up a high guard to weather the storm and end up exposing his hips for takedowns. But this time he was urgent in circling away quickly, spending as little time as possible in a position where Usman could hit easy takedown entries.



As soon as he found himself cornered, Edwards would throw up a long guard while circling out, extending his lead hand and holding his rear hand up by his ear. The long guard is great for covering the head during brief spots of lateral movement, as it protects well against sweeping blows which can cut off escape routes. Edwards’ long guard was open up the middle, but his active feet took care of that, circling away from the straight blows. Even if they connected, he was quickly outside them and away from the danger of the cage. Of course, the guard doesn’t protect from sweeping blows to the body or leg, but those weren’t much of a threat against Usman.

The third Usman fight stands out in my mind as I can’t recall another time I’ve seen a fighter fix so many of their fundamental issues in such a short time. But it remains to be seen whether Edwards needed to have that career best performance beaten into him by the missteps of their previous fight, or if he’s turned a corner and is now able to summon that strategic focus when necessary.

 

[The MM Analyst]

Continued Here...​

The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but I go in depth on Leon's clinch game and wall wrestling.

I'm not sure why imgur embeds are broken, if someone can point me to another site I can use to embed I'll fix the clips.

You can find an album of all the clips in this post here.