“Six months of sprawl training.” Through the early 2000s this went from sincere belief, to meme, and back to sincere belief for a great many of MMA’s hardcore fans. Viewers knew they were not seeing the best striking in the world in mixed martial arts and that there was plenty of room for improvement, but the stumbling block was always the grappling. It is obviously hard to pursue one combat sport to an elite level while also pursuing a completely different one recreationally. Even if you adore wrestling as a world class boxer, you are very unlikely to be world class in both sports so you stick to the one that pays the bills and avoid the increased possibility of injury that comes with the other.

The theory was that if you were going to find a truly elite striker to bring to mixed martial arts you would have to find an established kickboxer and then somehow give him a cram course on the ins and outs of wrestling and jiu jitsu in a very short space of time compared to the time frame in which he developed his striking chops. Effectively fans were hoping for a coach to work out a way to game grappling so that you barely needed to know how to do it, or for a kickboxer who would prove even more of a prodigy in learning wrestling than they had in their original sport.

Of course it isn’t impossible: Israel Adesanya has just become the UFC middleweight champion despite spending most of his life training for stand up contests and taking up grappling late. And the “secret” – if there is one – is that huge elements of wrestling and kickboxing are effectively useless in mixed martial arts. Just as there are no double legs in kickboxing, there is no fence or wall walk in wrestling or jiu jitsu or judo. And so it comes down to what you can pick up from MMA specific grappling but just as importantly it is down to individual styles and how you adjust your style to an all out fist-fight.

For wrestlers, imagine a low shooter like John Smith, or an ankle pick wizard like David Taylor trying to force that kind of game in a mixed martial arts bout. And that is not to say that those styles wouldn’t work—we just haven’t really seen them—Ben Askren came over to MMA as a funky scrambler and had incredible success in spite of initial scepticism over how his funk would match up against black belt level jiu jitsu.

This brings us to Robin van Roosmalen: a fighter whose mixed martial arts career I have been following with fascination. It is not because I expect Van Roosmalen to storm his way to a major mixed martial arts title, but because his kickboxing style seems tailor made to not succeed in mixed martial arts, and if he is going to do great things in this new sport he is going to have to make changes.

When you watch a Van Roosmalen match in Glory it can often be a little frustrating because in terms of footwork, angles, set ups—he couldn’t care less. The style that won Van Roosmalen both Glory’s lightweight and welterweight belts is almost strictly catch-and-pitch. He fights like he spars and he spars like he fights—takes punches on his gloves and returns with fast punching flurries which are almost always concluded with a low kick.

For obvious reasons the earmuffs are a terrible defence for MMA. In kickboxing, Van Roosmalen’s gloves provided enough protection that he needn’t even adjust to the shots coming in, he could simply stay in position and weather the storm, then fire back immediately in the breaks. It allowed him to notch victories over Andy Ristie, Sittichai, Marat Grigorian, Gabriel Varga and Petpanomrung. On the downside it was also a style which, at its best, actively sought tit-for-tat exchanges and consequently a good number of Van Roosmalen’s most significant victories were controversial or even outrageous decisions. It just so happens that Van Roosmalen’s style of flurrying into low kicks is exactly what kickboxing judges—and especially the Dutch—love.

A very difficult way to earn your money.

The kickboxers who have claimed firm victories over Van Roosmalen have often done it by locking his hands to his guard, physically pushing him around and outmanoeuvring him, and by targeting his body. You need only look at Giorgio Petrosyan’s masterclass against Van Roosmalen to realise that yes, footwork still works.

Petrosyan forced cover ups and then checked Van Roosmalen’s hands to his head. Petrosyan would then either step out and pivot around Van Roosmalen, or push him straight back.

In Van Roosmalen’s last kickboxing bout he lost his Glory featherweight title to Petpanomrung as the Thai forced him to shell up with punches before tearing up his body with push kicks while the Dutchman covered up. Petrosyan also had good success with push kicks because Van Roosmalen’s catch-and-return style relies on being able to wedge his way into punching range with his hands on his head. Drive straight blows into the body and you can force him back, check his hands to his head and he can’t throw.

That is not to suggest that the featherweights in Bellator are going to dance around Van Roosmalen like Petrosyan or stomp on his guts like Petpanomrung, but squaring up with high hands is giving away the takedown or at least the clinch. It is a non-starter in MMA and so Van Roosmalen has already had to adapt.

Watching Robin van Roosmalen’s two fights in MMA so far, your first question will likely be “how did those guys have wins on their records?” But they give us a glimpse into a far more conservative Van Roosmalen—fighting with his head forward and his hips back, basically halfway to the sprawl already. When his opponent shoots, he tries to time the right uppercut.

When his opponent punches, Van Roosmalen parries and immediately returns with a couple of punches on his own but so far there is no sign of the Dutch combination work—hands into low kicks.

When Gokhan Saki decided to make a go of it in the UFC, his stylistic adaptations were pretty significant. Saki was famous for rapid flurries and guard strips—incredibly useful in kickboxing but almost pointless in mixed martial arts.

In the UFC, Saki worked far more extensively from a southpaw stance and used the double attack of left kick and left straight surprisingly effectively while trying to use footwork a little more to deny good takedown attempts.

With Israel Adesanya it is all footwork and feints. There very little extended combination work and while he is billed as an amazing kickboxer, he has abandoned a lot of the trappings that score highly in the sport of kickboxing in favour of a style that is far more suited to all-in fighting.

So far, Van Roosmalen has shown himself to be the standard kickboxer in MMA. Go forward and try to hit hard one shot at a time, sprawl hard as soon as the opponent shoots. This style tends to fall short when the opponent has the confidence to stand in between his attempts at takedowns and interestingly enough Van Roosmalen’s first opponent had success by bum rushing him to clinches, where his second opponent took long, timid shots before tapping to grounded low kicks.

The intrigue as Van Roosmalen enters Bellator is mostly the cage. The fence is the most popular means of getting up and it continues to work into the elite levels of mixed martial arts. Where the sprawl used to be the be all and end all of takedown defence, the wall walk is pretty much the keystone of takedown defence in modern mixed martial arts. Van Roosmalen was taken down several times in his first MMA match and looked extremely basic—attempting to kick out with both feet from guard and scramble up. A large part of Van Roosmalen’s success in MMA—or at least mainstream MMA—will be down to whether he can avoid the fence on the feet and then use the fence when he hits the ground.

But even with seemingly everything working against Van Roosmalen—his reliance on a cover up and return style in kickboxing, his lack of single-shot harassing weapons at range, his seeming lack of defensive ringcraft—he could still make a decent go of it with focus in the right areas and some playing with the ratios. It is always worth remembering that Rambaa Somdet is the most successful Nak Muay to enter MMA so far and everything about his kickboxing style suggested he wouldn’t be able to do it.

Somdet was short and stumpy compared to many of his Muay Thai opponents, just like Van Roosmalen, and he relied heavily on the step up inside low kick. It was a constant point scorer in Muay Thai, but if you threw it with anything close to the frequency in MMA that Somdet did in Muay Thai, you would essentially be handing the opponent a single leg attempt forty times a round. Somdet wasn’t a knockout artist, he wasn’t a noted combination striker, he didn’t like the clinch very much compared to many of his peers, he was a wicked left kick that very seldom finished fights and a lot of antics and dancing in between.

And yet Somdet was able to become one of the most successful strawweights in MMA history. Some of it was just doing what he was great at, but stepping it back again: maybe five or six great low kicks a round instead of twenty or thirty. Some of it was fighting away from his usual style and relying on heavy counter punches—it seemed like his B game was still good enough to hold up to the strikers he was meeting in Shooto. And some of it was surprising everyone by learning something new: for quite a while Somdet had one of the most interesting, active and successful guards in all of mixed martial arts. It is pretty remarkable that even today it is hardly talked about, but a Nak Muay from Thailand had one of the sport’s most interesting ground games and was able to strike off his back effectively even under a ruleset that prohibited elbows.

There is some reason to be hopeful then. Van Roosmalen might adapt his old looks, he might do well enough with his B game, or he might find or even invent something new! There is no sense writing him off ahead of time, but for every Israel Adesanya or Rambaa Somdet the path is littered with a hundred Tyrone Spongs and Jerome Le Banners. Sprawl and brawl just doesn’t cut it anymore.