What did you think of the striking of the UFC 217 title fights??

[aerius]

I don't know that it was impatience on Joanna's part so much as a weakness in her style (that, incidentally, seems to be something that developed only after her championship reign started): she needs people to come forward and put themselves in striking range. Joanna is best when people come forward and she can angle off and counter in combination. She really didn't have an answer for Rose's feints, she bit on so many of them without ever really starting to pressure forward herself. I think if she had walked Rose down a little more she would have been fine, Rose defends single strikes well but Joanna would have eaten her up with combos in the pocket if she had committed to forcing that range.

I think it's both. Joanna's opponents have come at her for the most part so she's adjusted her striking to deal with that, she hasn't had to play a patient game of setups in her entire UFC career. I also think Joanna doesn't have the best sense of distance which is part of why she needs to start touching with jabs/probes first before she can get things going. Which I think is why Rose's feints were so effective. Watching at home I could see that Rose was well out of range when she was feinting, but Joanna couldn't pick up on that and flinched or got frozen on every one. Definitely agreed on applying pressure against Rose, she's always been a good fighter when you given space & time to work, but under pressure she loses her composure pretty quickly and makes a lot of mistakes.

I do think you're right Joanna's combos were a little pat and that made it fairly easy for Rose to pick up on the rhythm and counter effectively. While I like Dutch style kickboxing a lot for MMA, I do find that the highly repetitive pattern striking you tend to see in that style can make it susceptible to quick reads and counters.

Yep. The Dutch style scores well in MMA and it's generally pretty effective. Personally I don't like it that much in MMA since with most fighters it becomes combo spamming where they just spam the same two combos over & over again with little regard to setups or making adjustments, it just becomes who can throw harder, faster, and land more.

 

[listrahtes]

Feint overload from TJ. He mixes up his striking very well. Something that really hypnotized Cody and something Cody didn’t really do very well at all.

Well how could Cody?
TJ has the much more diverse arsenal and can confuse his opponents very good because of all the tools he has.

I do think Cody should have fought more basic with a consistent jab, high guard (or at least higher as he fought) and more focus on straights. But well that maybe just not his style at all.

 

[Uchi Mata]

Yep. The Dutch style scores well in MMA and it's generally pretty effective. Personally I don't like it that much in MMA since with most fighters it becomes combo spamming where they just spam the same two combos over & over again with little regard to setups or making adjustments, it just becomes who can throw harder, faster, and land more.

To a large extent that's all it is even in kickboxing, mostly I think because of the short # of rounds in most fights. If you only had three rounds to fight in boxing, the notion of conserving energy, let your opponent work to get a read on him even if you drop a round, and setting stuff up over multiple rounds would probably disappear pretty quickly. I feel like Dutch is a very fast way to make an athletic person an effective fighter because the combos are good, sound combos and the things like trigger counters off blocked strikes are good, sound defensive reactions, but you hit a ceiling where you're not working on the kind of subtle things you might spend years working on in boxing or in the clinch in Muay Thai. High level MMA also lends itself much more to a patient, organic striking style than it does just coming forward and trying to overwhelm everyone with power and volume. Not that you can't come forward and pressure, but you need a deeper way of doing it than just 1-2-3-low kick until he falls over.

 

[biscuitsbrah]

Well how could Cody?
TJ has the much more diverse arsenal and can confuse his opponents very good because of all the tools he has.

I do think Cody should have fought more basic with a consistent jab, high guard (or at least higher as he fought) and more focus on straights. But well that maybe just not his style at all.

I think he needed to pressure tj instead of sit back and explode-counter like he did with Cruz. I know Cody doesn’t have the best cardio so he likes to explode and then rest which makes it hard to pressure. But sitting back and let TJ feint and kick you from the outside seems like a bad idea

 

[Jimmy Jazz]

I think he needed to pressure tj instead of sit back and explode-counter like he did with Cruz. I know Cody doesn’t have the best cardio so he likes to explode and then rest which makes it hard to pressure. But sitting back and let TJ feint and kick you from the outside seems like a bad idea

What makes you say that about his cardio?

 

[AndyMaBobs]

I'm still trying to figure out how Rose threw that hook cuz it looked like it somehow got Joanna to react to it like it was a straight?

Joanna had her guard up but when Rose popped forward, Joanna extended her arm exposing her chain for the left hook. Was it the way Rose was throwing it or what?



Looks like that was only the start of her combo too. Lead hook>rear straight>round house. IDK why Joanna thought it was a left straight and extended her right arm to grab it but that's why she got wrecked

IIRC

She dropped her base and drew out the counter

 

[ctrlaltdelete]

Great posts in this thread!

I'm still trying to figure out how Rose threw that hook cuz it looked like it somehow got Joanna to react to it like it was a straight?

Joanna had her guard up but when Rose popped forward, Joanna extended her arm exposing her chain for the left hook. Was it the way Rose was throwing it or what?

She exploited Joanna's bad habits from her previous couple fights. In her recent fights especially the one against Andrade, Joanna would extend her arm, post it against her opponent's shoulder and use the leverage guard to defend punches. It can work fine when she has a sizable reach advantage against slower opponents similar to how Jon Jones stiff-arms opponents trying to get in on him with punches. It gives her a quick transition to the clinch and/or a "handle" for her to swing her opponent away so she can get off the fence. Works fine against opponents like Andrade and to a lesser extent Claudia and Karolina. Against someone with similar reach & speed, well, we all saw what happened.

Great question, great answer.

I have a horrible habit of this - reaching to post on the person's shoulder to control them.
That bad habit is compounded with a reaching parry with my right hand when my opponent jabs.
It's something I'm working on.

 

[freaky]

Great posts in this thread!





Great question, great answer.

I have a horrible habit of this - reaching to post on the person's shoulder to control them.
That bad habit is compounded with a reaching parry with my right hand when my opponent jabs.
It's something I'm working on.

Me too. Is it a Muay Thai problem? I know boxer's teach you to be t-rex armed when parrying. I just find myself to be best when using a long guard stance. Hope I don't get KO like Joanna

 

[Jimmy Jazz]

Me too. Is it a Muay Thai problem? I know boxer's teach you to be t-rex armed when parrying. I just find myself to be best when using a long guard stance. Hope I don't get KO like Joanna

mma fighters dont really use the teep as effectively as muay thai fighters. I think if a muay thai fighter at the top level could just close the distance dropping bombs to get the ko worked it wouldve been apparent by now.

 

[biscuitsbrah]

What makes you say that about his cardio?

I think it’s clear he’s very explosive and purposely paces himself for 5 round fights. This is comparing his cardio to Cruz and Dillashaw though, so it might not be that fair

 

[CFGroup]

I disagree. Up until the head kick knockdown in the 2nd, TJ did a lot less dancing around than in the 1st. It was only after the knockdown that he went back to the more active footwork he was using earlier. Also, setups. Up until the knockdown kick, TJ would step from southpaw to orthodox and then throw the left kick or throw the left kick straight from the southpaw stance, that was TJ's pattern for the entire fight up to that point. On the knockdown kick, TJ snuck his right foot forward and landed a left switch kick instead of stepping through to southpaw and then throwing the left. Cody didn't see that in time and got whacked, he likely thought TJ would complete the stance switch and then throw the kick which would give him enough time to defend but it ended up being a switch kick that arrived much sooner than he expected.

TJ had set a pattern on his kicks that Cody had picked up on and was defending well. When TJ suddenly broke that pattern Cody got whacked. TJ effectively trained him to react a certain way to kicks then used it against him.

Yeah, TJ defiantly set and broke patterns to land. It looked like Cody reacted for a body kick with his opposite side hand when TJ went high.

Than the last shot, he faint laterally with footwork and then landed.

On the footwork thing, TJ has much better body mechanics in his striking than Cruz. TJ flows into grounded positions to throw, while Cruz is in broken angles that don't generate power.

For the most part, tons of exceptions of course.

 

[rmongler]

As i always like to say, kicks to the open side are super effective. Ovince, TJ, GSP, all showing it.

That shot Rose dropped Joanna with was one of the cleanest hooks i've ever seen; just a perfect break in at the end of the arc. Seems to me like JJ's camp was expecting rose to come in with a more grappling heavy gameplan like all her earlier fights; then she goes into hermit mode and comes out with mechanics on lockdown.

Zahabi's corner advice for Joe Duffy was just terrible. He was doing good things in the first round walking Vick down and timing him with the pull counter; second round comes around and he dutifully listens to the command to 'feint more', stops pulling the trigger as often, and gets pieced up. Another hot prospect falls victim to tristar soulsucking.

 

[devante]

GSP looked alright. I mean, he looked very good considering it's been 4 years since he retired. No small feat coming back to that stage after such a long break, quite amazing actually. Striking wise he looked a bit slower than his younger self, but most improve seemed to be his power. He has found a way to sit down a little more and with the added weight it has paid off. He was starting to fade a little bit though, so I think it's a good thing for him he caught Bisping with that hook (big surprise), or I could see Bisping overwhelming him. It's obvious he worked on the overhand specificly for Bisping. He's always had a pretty hard overhand right. Jab was nice and long, and spearing, as always. Was very cool to see Roach in the corner!

Cody never jabs and hardly throws straights. He's always a little open in the pocket and uses flurries as hooks. The thing is, he is so fast and powerful that he gets away with it. He's also an excellent counter puncher, not at least in the sense that he doesn't mind taking one to give one either. This time it just didn't work for him. That combination that ended it could have gone either way imo, it was pretty random that TJ landed and not he other way around. The headkicks though, TJ set them up well. Cody has his hands down most of the time and it's a weakness coming over the top with the kick, especially as TJ is good at setting it up and Cody is mostly boxing orientated.

Joanna vs Rose was a surprise I'd say. I mean, I knew Rose had her best chance in the first as she always starts strong and Joanna always starts slow, but never expected that KO. Rose was looking really good before that point though. She was a lot tighter than she usually is, she moved well, she read everything and she had a great rhythm going with manipulating her weight around constantly. I kept commenting on how good she looked up untill the stoppage.

Joanna has shown holes in her striking defense before, she tends to get tagged on the inside and she doesn't really protect her chin that well. It's just that her last fight she looked so damn good against Andrade and used her range and movement so well staying on the outside. This was a very different matchup though. Looked like she expected the jab or something as she was pawing with the rear hand and then bam. Huge upset.

cody is great on the counter, has a great jab; but rarely commits to it.. that fight was there for the taking and he blew it by hunting dillashaw and looking for the ko.

when in fact he should have kept drawing tj in and countering him, taking adv of his handspeed..footspeed..explosiveness and mobility; instead of walking into the pocket and exchanging w/dillashaw. Cody lacks the nuance and the durability to play that game..

 

[ctrlaltdelete]

Me too. Is it a Muay Thai problem? I know boxer's teach you to be t-rex armed when parrying. I just find myself to be best when using a long guard stance. Hope I don't get KO like Joanna

Its definitely a muay thai habit. I am pretty comfortable in the clinch so when im in that distance realm i anticipate closing distance and the bad habits come out. One of the amateur fighters at my gym makes me pay for it consistently.

If your / my / Joanna's right shoulder was high enough to protect the chin and / or ducking the head deep enough, the jaw and temple wouldn't be exposed as much and a left hook could be deflected off your body.

Then again, tucking your chin and raising your shoulder lile that opens you up to a left uppercut coming right up under your right arm.

Thats why this is chess, not checkers i guess. If a person makes the same mistake twice or more and the opponent has enough experience to see the opening and know how to capitalize on it, you'll pay for it.

 

[aerius]

He didn't. He started the round off doing a ton of dancing, and he did a lot of fancy footwork moves. He was even trying superman punches, spinning backfists off kicks and all kinds of flash in minute and a half before that head kick that landed:

That's a ton of dancing for only 90 seconds. And he continued to dance after the head kick, even up until the finishing sequence. It's definitely not fair to say he stopped screwing around with that dancing footwork. He was using it to look for angles, to reset, to set up punches, kicks and even a takedown attempt as shown in my gif. Also, he tried nearly the exact same switch kick in the first round:

I've watched the fight a few more times after you posted and I can see where you're coming from even though I don't completely agree. Also, you're a poopy-pants and you smell.

I agree that TJ did some dancing in the 2nd but it was how & where he was doing it that was different from the 1st. In the 1st round, TJ would do his dance steps and stance switches on the outside and when he attacked Cody it was almost always in Cruz style to Garbrandt's left side. TJ would blitz to Cody's left then use a shift or dart to try and cut in on the weak side. Cody caught onto that pretty quickly and had him neutralized.

In the 2nd, Cody still dance stepped on the outside to find the position in the cage that he wanted, but other than the 2nd sequence and finishing sequence pretty much all of his attacks were straight in on Cody instead of to the side and then in like in the 1st. The superman you mentioned was straight in as were almost all the kicks and takedown attempts.

So it's incorrect to say Cody got caught because he expected the kick to come slower. The difference was in how he reacted with his feet. On the first kick, he used good footwork to move away while maintaining his stance. In the second, he shot his hips back first and pulled his lead leg back, stepping out of stance to leave him off balance and with hands out of position. It looked like Cody was expecting a body kick, hence him scooting his hips back and reaching his lead arm down. It wasn't about thinking he had more time, it was about him thinking the kick was going low, and if you look at the kick just before it snaps up high the chamber could easily have been for a body kick:

If there was a pattern it was TJ kicking low and to the body, then kicking high, that got Cody. It wasn't about how fast Cody reacted, it was about him reacting incorrectly.

I see what you mean. In either case, it was a pattern break that got Cody whacked.