In women’s mixed martial arts there are only two stories. There is the ongoing battle for the straw-weight crown, with its emerging contenders, new champ Weili Zhang, and its still razor sharp former champs. Then there is the rivalry between Amanda Nunes and Valentina Shevchenko. Above 115 pounds, that is all that matters.

Nunes has beaten everyone she has met in the last six years and dominated each, except Shevchenko. Their fights have been close enough that Shevchenko is convinced that she should be the women’s bantamweight champion and there are many in the public who agree with her. Through the last two rounds of their second fight it was clear that neither fighter wanted to lead or deviate from their ineffective gameplan. And that is where it was left: the UFC opened a new division to get a belt on Valentina with nowhere near enough talent to offer anything other than squash matches, and the rivalry remains in the back of everyone’s mind.

When you cut away all the obsessive fandom and the creepiness that goes with it, and the hyperbole that accompanies seemingly any dominant female champion in the sport, Shevchenko is exceptional for forcing a fight through every phase and range, while remaining something of a minimalist.

Check Hooks and Easy Clinches

Shevchenko’s counter fighting is built around her control of distance. This is not unusual in mixed martial arts but the way that she goes about it is quite peculiar in our sport. Shevchenko sets herself up just beyond the end of her opponent’s range—in a notably higher and shorter stance than most—and then waits. And waits.

She could well be categorized as the most stubborn counter fighters since the heyday of Anderson Silva. This occasionally results in tedious matches—as against Liz Carmouche and Amanda Nunes—but more often her opponent is happy to oblige. In a division of scrappy but unrefined strikers, the idea is often that grit can overcome craft if thrown directly at it. Most of the time, as we know, it does not.

What is especially noticeable in Shevchenko is her preference for short, shuffling movements as if more than any other aspect of her performance she is concerned with fuel economy. She often seems to present a static target for her opponent—albeit a twitchy one—but the adjustments in range are almost constant. This obsessive control of distance is one very mundane factor which often separates the good striker from the great striker. Saenchai might be a little too flattering as a comparison, but he is a fighter who often gives up height and reach as Shevchenko does, and who also fights from the end of his opponent’s range and gets them to routinely overreach themselves in spite of this. An obsession with range and the use of hundreds and hundreds of small, shuffling foot movements have the net result of seeming to keep the fighter locked in place just out of reach.

While the purpose of fighting from just beyond the end of the opponent’s range is to draw an overcommitment, the landscape of women’s MMA is saturated with fighters whose only means of attack is wading into running combinations anyway. The perfect example of this is Holly Holm who—despite being the most accomplished female boxer of all time—will repeat the same shifting left straight-right uppercut-left straight combination over and over throughout a fight. Holm lunged after Shevchenko and was met with a checking right hook each time as Shevchenko deviated slightly from the line of attack.

And for the most part the counter right hook is enough. Shevchenko retreats and evades often enough to get a read on her opponent, and when she’s actually close enough to lunge at it is because she wants to counter. The counter right hook can allow her to break off line and end the engagement there, or follow with the left straight over the top of her opponent’s as against Chookagian and Nunes.

Or it can allow her to enter an over-the-back clinch. This is still women’s MMA after all and people have to be head and arm thrown at some point. She was successful with this throw off her check hook against Kaufmann and others but, unsurprisingly, it went pretty poorly against Holly Holm—who obviously spent a lot of time preparing for WMMA’s greatest head-and-arm thrower, Ronda Rousey.

Watching any Shevchenko fight you will hear Joe Rogan praising her head movement and ability to just avoid a punch and return with a counter. The real secret of Shevchenko’s defensive excellence is that she is seldom in exchanging range for more than a beat or two. The vast majority of engagements happen because she has chosen not to leave range as the opponent enters—so she is ready to slip and counter. But more than that, after her counter she will rarely push her luck. She almost never works in combinations and even then never more than two strikes. Most importantly, she is never shy of the clinch. The easiest way to earn a reputation as an unhittable boxer is to slip the first punch and clinch before the second.

Shevchenko’s ability to get opponents chasing or charging to close the distance plays easily into takedowns. A short level change and she’s in on the hips of opponents who are running over the top of her, expecting her to retreat to the end of their range. And while you might accuse her of not pushing her advantages on striking exchanges, Shevchenko makes the most of every takedown even if it just means holding the opponent down in closed guard.

While Holly Holm’s work against Shevchenko was misguided and one-note, it was Jessica Eye who provided the perfect style match up for the flyweight champion. Bursts of wild, telegraphed, chasing aggression, followed by pauses to recompose. Shevchenko would drop away and move off line as Eye came in pumping double right hands, and then as Eye turned to face her, Shevchenko would hammer in the left body kick under Eye’s right arm.

The Lead Leg as Bait

Smarter opponents realize that charging Shevchenko is only offering her up easy counters. For most fighters when dealing with an evasive opponent there are only two options: chasing and catching them with a good shot to the head, or kicking the lead leg as it is the nearest target even during a retreat. For this reason a great many of Shevchenko’s opponents have tried to march into outside low kicks and she has used this as a trigger for her counters.

Against Kaufmann, Chookagian and other less polished kickers, Shevchenko capitalized by intercepting the low kick, allowing it to ride up her thigh, and running through on easy takedowns. Against Joanna Jędrzejczyk, Shevchenko had to be sharper. That fight was twenty five minutes of minutely adjusting distance as Jędrzejczyk insisted on getting close enough before throwing and Shevchenko refused to let it happen. When Jędrzejczyk did step up into her whipping lead leg low kick, Shevchenko withdrew her lead leg and immediately returned it, digging in an upward kick straight into the hamstring of Jędrzejczyk’s missed kick.

This brings us on to Shevchenko’s signature counter and perhaps this writer’s pick for “most frustrating technique.” This is Shevchenko’s use of spinning techniques in answer to step up low kicks. The back kick, the wheel kick and the backfist are all used interchangeably here. It looks spectacular, and in a way it makes sense: the low kick insures the opponent is close enough to strike, and it will even assist the fighter into the turn.

The flaw in the technique is that Shevchenko is always spinning to strike the closed side. Even if her timing is razor sharp and the opponent doesn’t expect it, she more often ends up striking shoulders and backs than she does heads. Curiously the only person these actually landed effectively on was Jędrzejczyk while much worse technical strikers were surprised but effectively unharmed.

To see the back kick used as a counter you will notice that switch-hitter, Raymond Daniels always changes to be in the same stance as his opponent. Paul Felder also attempted the same counter against the right low kicks of Dan Hooker but was a little too plodding.

The Nunes Rematch

We understand that Valentina Shevchenko’s style of counter striking comes down to two things: establishing and maintaining the correct distance—just beyond the opponent’s reach, and offering up just a few targets to draw predictable leads. It is with those two ideas in mind that we can examine her most recent loss, when she challenged Amanda Nunes for the women’s bantamweight title in September 2017.

It is tempting to boil this fight down to “Nunes did nothing and so Shevchenko had nothing to counter” and then leave it at that. That is good enough for a laugh, and no one should feel like they have to watch this crushingly dull bout again, but there was a clear path to the fight that revealed some interesting truths about both Nunes and Shevchenko.

Through the first two or three rounds, Nunes was able to take away Shevchenko’s best weapons through feints and pressure. You will notice that in any other fight, Shevchenko will slowly shuffle back, adjusting the range, and leaving the line of attack to begin turning the opponent when she feels she needs to.

Watching their first fight, Nunes falls for the same looks as everyone else. She is swinging right hands and suddenly she’s not as close as she thought—overreaching and presenting her chin on a platter. In the rematch Nunes used feints to make Shevchenko move back, then stepped in to correct the distance again and move Shevchenko to the fence—getting far too close to actual hitting distance for Shevchenko to feel comfortable reading and countering.

When Nunes did lead, the compressed range and cage position meant that she wasn’t being forced to run up into her attacks and try to catch Shevchenko’s lead leg on the way out. Nunes was actually able to vary her targets and make Shevchenko work. The rear leg front kick to the body—a southpaw killer—worked a treat along the fence. And when she wanted to step in with her right hand, Nunes used a nice up-jab to force Shevchenko into a backward lean in order to crack her with the right straight.

Similar to Lopez – Lomachenko (which we discussed last week), Nunes vs Shevchenko II was a fight in which the power puncher took away the technician’s finesse and deceptions, and then the technician forced their way back into the bout by engaging in an honest fight. The more Shevchenko lashed out from her position of discomfort, the more respect Nunes gave her and the further they started to drift away from the fence and back into the centre of the cage.

Oddly enough Shevchenko mostly fought her way back into the bout by holding down the shoulder buttons and spamming superman punches. This technique appears in almost every Shevchenko fight and serves the purpose of backing the opponent up so she can run into a follow up low kick. Against Nunes it seemed like it was all Shevchenko was comfortable throwing—perhaps because it lent her a bit of height as she closed the distance and she was able to check Nunes’ lead hand throughout.

It was at this point that a slow fight turned into a staring contest. Nunes seemed to have lost her confidence to apply pressure but Shevchenko seemed stuck waiting to counter. On the very rare occasion that Shevchenko did lash out with a low kick or punch, Nunes tried to “get it back” and Shevchenko was able to counter effectively.

This weekend Valentina Shevchenko meets Jennifer Maia. Another seeming no hoper whose striking style is erratic bouncing around the cage, punctuated by obvious setting of her feet and telegraphing her intention to step in and swing wild. She seems an easy bout for Shevchenko on paper. Of course it is the fight game so there is always room to be surprised but for most the focus is on Amanda Nunes – Valentina Shevchenko III in the not too distant future.

Weaknesses in Shevchenko are not glaringly obvious but the thing that will limit her is an inability to adapt. Make no mistake, a third fight with Nunes is a fight that she can win, but it would involve leaving the comfort zone of almost pure counter fighting. Shevchenko wins most of these bouts on cruise control and that is remarkably impressive, but fighting is about questions and answers. So far Shevchenko has been asking the same questions of everyone she has met and they have all been left bamboozled, except when Nunes backed her onto the cage as said “what can you do now?”