How Leon Edwards and Alexandre Pantoja

~ Defended the Crowns ~

After months of build up to this fight, and years of work on his character, Colby Covington turned to stone under the bright lights of UFC 296. Unlike his bouts with Kamaru Usman he did not fall short in a valiant effort that even his biggest detractors had to respect. No, against Leon Edwards he delivered one of the all time UFC title fight stinkers as he sat on his hands and refused to do anything but prepare his excuses for the post-fight interview.

Yet even in the worst bouts we can examine habits and learn new wrinkles from fighters, particularly those as smooth as Leon Edwards. The first surprise in this title fight was that Edwards came out orthodox. He has always been an occasional switch hitter but about ninety percent of his work is usually done from southpaw. In this fight he switched throughout and found good success out of his less practiced position. Standing orthodox when Covington prefers to fight southpaw obviously opened up the power leg round kick to the body and head on the open side. A sneakier weapon that saw a lot more action in this fight was the lead leg front kick.

Edwards seems to have pinched a trick from Nassourdine Imavov and Cyril Gane when it comes to open stance front kicking. Both Gane and Imavov will pick their lead leg up to front kick and then instead of keeping their knee vertical, they will allow it to rotate out from the hip. This results in a front kick that rises towards the outside rather than straight up and down, and in an open stance match up this seems to mitigate some of the threat of a successful front kick sliding off the opponent and putting them outside the kickers lead leg while he is still hopping on one foot.

Fig. 1

Turning the knee out also means that the foot comes to the inside of the body and can sneak around the inside of the opponent’s knee should they raise it—as Covington did in the above example. But the main benefit is that it plays to the “kick into the open side” rule. You kick towards the opponent’s belly button and, for most fighters, that’s off to one side rather than straight ahead. This is essentially the reverse of the “triangle kick” (or in Kyokushin “crescent kick”) which is a front kick thrown on an angle. The lead leg triangle kick is best suited to closed stance match ups, where this outward front kick is better suited to open stance engagements.

Fig. 2

It being a Leon Edwards fight you would expect at least one tricky attempt at a high kick and Edwards made a decent one in round two. Back in his traditional southpaw position, this brought the fight to a closed stance dynamic. This meant that rather than kicking against Covington’s back arm and not much else, Edwards had to sneak the kick over the lead arm and shoulder. To do this he used the inside hand trap that Anderson Silva used against Yushin Okami. Figure 3 shows the sequence.

Extending his left hand as if to throw a left straight, Edwards keeps his thumb down and his palm facing out to catch on the inside of Covington’s right wrist (b). He throws the kick at the same time as he tugs the lead hand out of position and while he cannot hope to keep hold of Covington’s wrist, he has a good shot of beating Covington back to his guard.

Fig. 3

Through the twenty five minute ordeal there was only a smattering of effective striking, but this fight served more as a demonstration of Edwards’ wrestling chops. Long considered one of the best clinch fighters in MMA, Edwards had little trouble handling the obvious takedown attempts from Covington when they weren’t hidden by his usual hyperactive aggression. Covington is a master of the locked hands double along the fence and so Edwards spent much of the fight insisting on wrist control and preventing Covington’s hands from coming together in any meaningful way.

Figure 4 shows a great example from round 4. Covington has run Edwards to the fence with a single leg and now wants to convert to his signature locked hands double. The moment that he unlocks his hands from around Edwards’ left leg, Edwards pushes his left wrist back into his belly (b). Covington squirms to free his wrist and Edwards is able to pass it across to his overhooking left hand (c). This frees Edwards’ right hand to frame on Covington’s face as he circles backwards off the fence and leaves Covington on his knees (d) (e) (f).

Fig. 4

Another example of Edwards’ ubiquitous wrist control can be seen in the ninja choke sequence. On the Boicast we ruminated on how Colby Covington’s head forwards and locked hands grappling style saw him run into many close calls against guillotines and kimuras, but wrote off Edwards as “not that sort of fighter.” Figure 5 shows that we got it wrong.

Covington has once again run Edwards to the fence and dropped low to attempt his ankle pick—where he posts his head inside the knee and pulls the foot out with his right hand (a). Notice that Edwards is not holding Covington’s wrist but has his hand firmly inside of Covington’s, able to block it and bat it off when Covington attempts to grip. Covington begins to come up and controls inside of Edwards’ biceps (b). Edwards may be using an illegal grip in the glove here as it is hard to imagine he can control legally with his hand at this angle. While Covington’s head is pressed in, Edwards’ right hand slips up to the collar bone (c) giving him the position to secure a choke. Edwards throws his left hand out to the side to break Covington’s grip (d) and races back to lock his hands in a figure four, making a good attempt at the ninja choke before Covington gator rolls free.

Fig. 5

If the welterweight title fight was a perfect anti-wrestling performance, the flyweight title fight proved that grappling is still very much real. Alexandre Pantoja looked sensational in dismantling his old foe, Brandon Royval. The performance was another one that walked the line between Pantoja’s incredibly slick technical ground fighting and his desire to swing for the knockout on the feet with every punch. So the double and triple right hands were still present, as was the switching to southpaw to only throw his right hand from there. One area in which Pantoja did look razor sharp was his clinch striking. He threw right hands into double collar ties against Brandon Moreno when Moreno covered up, but here against Royval he was repeatedly able to take the single collar tie and triceps grip that Chidi Njoukuani used so destructively against Michał Oleksiejczuk a few months back. Figure 6 shows the action.

Closing off a striking exchange, Pantoja has a right collar tie and a left triceps grip, keeping his left elbow tight to prevent Royval digging an underhook and coming chest-to-chest (a). Pantoja has his right foot back because his right knee will fire up the centreline more easily than his left (b). (Refer to Dieselnoi’s discussions with Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu to get some more insights on kneeing the open side from in tight.) As he comes down from the knee, Pantoja steps wide and pulls Royval into the pivot (c), turning him, breaking his posture and putting him in position for another knee strike (d). Instead of kneeing, Pantoja releases his grips and Royval snaps into an upright posture (e) as Pantoja drops onto his hips to finish a locked hands double against the fence.

Fig. 6

Much of the fight was spent with Pantoja on top, dominating Royval and beating him to the transition in scrambles. Commentators have been very harsh on Royval but Pantoja was proving to be a smooth operator on the mat. For instance, his misdirection knee slide against Royval’s scissor guard. Figure 7 shows a great example of a scissor get up from the Edwards vs Covington title fight for comparison.

Covington is in Edwards’ closed guard (a). Edwards uses two hands on Covington’s neck (thumbs down the inside of the collar bones optional) to create some space (b), and slide his left knee in front of Covington. As Covington comes back in the knee prevents him from getting fully on top of Edwards, who switches his left hand to a stiff arm in the biceps (d) and builds up to a hand (e), escaping back to his feet while Covington is still on his knees.

Fig. 7

Figure 8 shows a scenario from the Pantoja - Royval fight. Pantoja is in combat base, with his right knee splitting Royval’s guard, but Royval has a scissor knee shield in (a). Pantoja keeps pressure into the knee shield with his chest and raises his butt into a tripod position (b). Pantoja steps to the middle and mule kicks his left leg up behind him, seemingly in an attempt to step over Royval’s right leg and force half guard on that side—just as Georges St. Pierre did to force half guard so routinely (c). Instead, Pantoja collapses his standing leg and falls into a near side knee slide over Pantoja’s left leg (d), forcing half guard on the opposite side (e).

Fig. 8

From half guard, Pantoja was dominant. He relied heavily on the near side underhook, a pass pioneered by BJ Penn and later adopted by John Danaher and Sean Williams out of Renzo Gracie’s team. In half guard the battle is for the underhook on the side of the trapped leg. If the top man gets it he can pass. If the bottom man gets it he can build up to an elbow or hand. But the top man can choose not to contest the underhook on that side and instead take the near side underhook. Figure 9 shows Pantoja sneaking in the near side underhook as Royval hammerfists him. Notice that the underhook is on the opposite side to Pantoja’s trapped leg.

Fig. 9

The genius of the near side underhook is that once the top man snags it and flattens the bottom man out, the bottom man is never going to get up on that elbow. Even if the bottom man has the underhook on the other side, he cannot use it. Pantoja spent a good amount of time in this bout simply stalling from the near side underhook because he was gassing out and Royval had no answers to it. Figure 10 shows an instance where Royval underhooked Pantoja’s leg on the same side as the near side underhook and spent a good thirty seconds giving himself a hernia before realizing that there was nothing he could do with that leg to affect Pantoja’s balance or position.

Fig. 10

Figure 11 shows a typical Pantoja pass from the near side underhook. He raises his butt in the air (c) and this proves enough to free his left knee. He pins Royval’s right thigh to the floor with his knee and shin and begins passing to mount, but Royval uses his forearm as a frame to prevent this (d). Pantoja smoothly changes direction and hops off to side control (e), (f).

Fig. 11

The near side underhook was so strong for Pantoja that whenever he began to lose position from side control, the back or mount, he would hop across Royval’s body into half guard on the opposite side and take an uncontested near side underhook.

Pantoja fought like a mad man on the feet, and forced the takedown so persistently that he wound up puffing in rounds four and five. In his sole moment of jeopardy on the mat, Pantoja managed to show something we discussed in our previous Pantoja study: The Bar Brawling Back Snatcher. When stuck on the bottom of half guard, Pantoja pulled Royval in tight (b) and as Royval postured up, Pantoja threw his legs across in front of Royval, attacking the reap (c), (d). In that previous article we discussed that this particular configuration of the legs—the far hip ashi—is not generally favoured in submission grappling but in creating a scramble from a bad position in a fist fight, it is a severely underrated technique. The moment that Pantoja’s feet are joined on Royval’s far hip, he can use both legs together to turn Royval’s knee away and make it impossible for Royval to land any meaningful ground and pound. The fact that Pantoja threw this reap in such a tight space with no help from his hands is even more impressive.

 Fig. 12