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Great analysis, and much better then the posts saying “uh he lost cause woodley is better”. Well no shit. Ts isn’t trying to say till is better and just got caught or something. He’s showing why and how woodley won and breaking it down.We all know Till has a Muay Thai background and we also know that in fights involving kicks (MT, KB, TKW, etc.), an upright stance is the safest. I don't need to explain why an upright stance is smarter in kicking sports and a lower stance smarter in ports where your legs will be grabbed and taken out from under your centre of gravity.
So Till chose to stand up in a Muay Thai stance against a wrestler who is shorter than him. This was clearly a mistake. This meant that Till would have to react to Woodley's takedown attempts and faints by switching to a sort of wrestling stance and then reverting to his upright stance when out of danger as we see in the screen shot below.
Here we see Till reacting to what he perceived as a danger (the main threat being a takedown), by changing his stance from upright to lower crouched one, which makes sense when your opponent is a wrestler, especially when you believe he doesn't want to exchange punches with you. So Till did the smart thing when being attacked. But what about when it was his turn to attack? This was his mistake, when he attacked he didn't change his stance, he wasn't defensively responsible when attacking. Till didn't feel there was a danger when he attacked which is why he didn't take any defensive measures in his attacks. He unerestimated Woodley's boxing. He unload punches in an upright stance against a wrestler in a boxing stance who is shorter and has a powerful right cross.
What follows is my analysis of the main mistake Till made.
Here we see Woodley in a boxer's stance, his chin is right above his front foot , it is not directly above his centre of gravity but slightly forward. This makes it look as if he is closer than he really, it is an illusion. Till's chin is right above his centre of gravity and there is no illusion of distance created here. Woodley can evade Till's punch, without moving away from Till simply by pulling back a few inches to bring his chin right above his centre of gravity which leaves Till open to a counter right hand. Till cannot pull back and bring his chin backwards past his centre of gravity because he would be out of balance. What Till should have done is use angles and footwork to set up his punches. We saw none of this, instead Till went straight in, no angles no set up and paid for it.
Here we see Woodly pulling back as explained above, in good balance and defensively responsible and ready to counter with that vicious right hand. Till is the one attacking here rather than being attacked and doesn't feel there is a danger in this range of the fight, so he stays upright and enter straight in. He ends up taking the right hand in the face for his naivety.
And here is the price Till paid for being so naive.
What Woodley did here is done by every competent boxer which Till isn't. This isn't a performance error from Till's part, it is a competence error. At such a high level this kind of error isn't performance error. He might be good at Muay Thai but boxing is another thing. My favourite boxer, Miguel Cotto, exemplifies Woodley's stance very well.
The yellow line is Till's stance; the blue line is Woodley's stance, which is the stance Cotto takes; the red line is the reference point which Till used to calculate distance for his attack; and the green line is the space Cotto has from which to defend and counter. In this stance you can appear closer than you really are so when some naive boxer aims at the red line you can defend and counter all night while staying safe and defensively responsible. Boxing 101.
TL;DR: Till needs to learn basic boxing.
Watching the fight I also noticed how high he stood and how much he reacted to every feint which is just asking to get set up. I’m not trying to make this about Conor and hate how everyone makes everything about him, but there’s a good example of this in his fight with Alvarez. Conor knows how to frame on a td And is also great at gauging distance. Eddie does a lot of feints and Conor didn’t even react to them and still was able to defend when Alvarez actually did go in for a shot.
Till was so worried about those feints that he couldn’t even attempt to throw anything significant. There’s a good video of firas breaking down how Rory beat woodley and it’s pretty amazing.
