Joshua Van vs Brandon Royval part 1

At UFC 317, Joshua Van made himself into one of the most exciting title challengers in all of MMA. But Brandon Royval helped.

The UFC is getting old. I don’t mean the sport the UFC promotes. Though MMA is undeniably experiencing, if not a decline, then at least a contraction, it currently boasts several of the best fighters in its history. But the UFC is getting old. Dana White is old and disinterested. He’d rather be playing politics than promoting fights, and when he does bother to attend an event, he spends half the time watching boxing on his phone. Joe Rogan is old and uninformed. Once regarded as the man whose job was to put Mike Goldberg in his place, he has now become Mike Goldberg, only without all the hair.

Most of all, though, the UFC roster is old. In almost every division, the rankings are clogged with fighters in their mid-to-late thirties, and the matchmakers have spent the last half decade making cheap content out of middle-aged also-rans instead of scouting and signing young talent.

What a relief then, both to those of us watching and to those who (ostensibly) hope to keep us so, that we have Joshua Van. At just 23 years old, Van is one of the youngest fighters on the entire UFC roster. He has, as he mentioned in his UFC 317 post-fight interview, only been training for five years. Yet he has managed to pack 17 professional fights into that short span of time. Remarkably, nine of those took place in the Octagon, and over the last two years alone.

When it was announced that Van would be stepping in on just three weeks notice to fight Brandon Royval at UFC 317, I felt sure it would prove too much too soon. Of course I knew that Van was good. There was little doubt in my mind that he was destined for a long and fruitful contendership. But not even a year had passed since he was knocked out by the underrated but certainly-not-great Charles Johnson. And even if Van had managed to cram in another four wins since, only the most recent one, over the underrated Bruno Silva, was the kind of comprehensive victory we expect to see out of future contenders.

Meanwhile, Brandon Royval had recent wins over two-time former champ Brandon Moreno, and Tatsuro Taira, one of flyweight’s few other young talents. And while still capable of the shocking violence that made him a contender in the first place, he had spent the last few years cultivating an evasive, long-range, high-output style of striking, none too accurate but certainly annoying. It seemed like the perfect style to frustrate a young man whose toughest fights had all come against rangy kickboxers.

Maybe the UFC matchmakers are smarter than I give them credit for, or maybe Joshua Van is simply that special. One way or the other, Van not only overcame Royval, he got the better of him in one hell of a war, an instant classic that set him up for a shot at flyweight champ Alexandre Pantoja, and made him one of the most exciting challengers in the history of this beleaguered division.

None Shall Pass

The fight started predictably enough. By the end of the first minute, Royval had already thrown upwards of 30 strikes. Of those, however, only a few leg kicks landed with any force. Van kept a firm grip on the distance, applying his trademark pressure but with the newfound patience that had marked his last fight. In fact, Van threw no strikes at all for that first minute. He feinted, testing Royval’s reactions and defending with small movements whenever something came back at him; and all the while the gap between the fighters shrank, little by little.

Royval probably would have been happy to go on throwing vast quantities of mostly harmless strikes, but as Van’s pressure heated up and he felt himself nearing the fence, he decided to try scaring the kid off with a flurrying combination. That’s when he found out what Van was waiting for.

Royval leads with a soft left hand, trying to time Van’s entry step, but he comes up way short. Van keeps a light lead foot, which means he has no difficulty abandoning that forward step and reversing course. Royval sticks out the left a second time, but this one is even softer, less of a cross and more of a flicker jab off the wrong hand, with the idea of keeping Van’s eyes occupied and buying time to close in with the right. But Van’s distance management is too good. He slides back with a couple of tidy hop-steps, keeping eyes on his man and waiting out the big, committal strike.

It comes in the form of a right hook. Royval leaps into it—and way overshoots the mark. Van stops his retreat on a dime, watches Royval’s hook sail past his nose, and welcomes Royval to the pocket with a hook of his own. Van’s hook is shorter and more compact. He doesn’t need to reach for it because he’s got Royval flinging himself forward so recklessly that he winds up with his lead foot well past Van’s own. The first clean punch of the fight is a hard one, the impact doubled by Royval’s own momentum, and Van follows it up with an equally short right hand.

Almost all of Van’s success in the first round came on the counter, and virtually all of those counters were the product of his superior distance management.

In this example, Royval tries to punish a wayward body kick. He rushes forward with an awkward hook to the body, probably looking to set up a long straight left upstairs, but by the time he’s gotten the first shot off, Van has already reset his feet and returned to a safe distance. A career’s worth of experience tells Royval that there is still an opportunity here; Van has started to retreat, and usually that means an opportunity to press the opponent into a mistake.

So Royval comes forward, feinting aggressively. He is looking for the kind of panicked overcommitment which usually occurs in such circumstances. A hard foot feint: maybe Van will swing wildly and expose himself. An aggressive feint with the hands: maybe Royval will duck into a knee. A fake right hook, and then a real one: maybe Van will—oh. Maybe Van will punch him in the face.

The thing about distance is that it trumps everything—literally everything. Other kinds of defense, hands and head movement, can be drawn out and exploited. You go to parry the jab, you eat a left hook; you duck the right hand, an uppercut meets you on the way down. But a step back stops them all. The ways to exploit a retreat are either to advance more quickly than the opponent can flee, or else to run him out of real estate. But this is why we talk about distance management. Fighters who excel at controlling the distance don’t just react to the opponent’s aggression, they use small steps to prevent him getting to a position from which he can launch a successful attack in the first place. And if the opponent insists on attacking anyway, if he tries to rush forward and ram through the front door, then the retreating fighter takes advantage of his commitment. He pivots, and maybe smacks him with a left hook in the process.

Back to Basics

Fortunately, in addition to being one tough son of a bitch, Brandon Royval is also quite coachable. His corner picked up on the problem. After the first round, they advised him that Van was almost exclusively countering the left hand. They pointed out that Van was using the distance as a trigger, and asked Royval to confuse his timing and sense of range with foot feints.

Whether or not they also told him to actually nail Van with the jab before trying to build off it I don’t know. The broadcast cut away from Royval’s corner after the above. But Royval’s jab certainly did start to land in the second round: as a lead, as a counter, and as a parting shot at the end of exchanges, discombobulating Van when he tried to reset.

Everyone knows that the jab is the punch that sets up every other, but what often gets lost is the fact that it must be felt as a weapon in its own right in order for those setups to work. This does not necessarily mean that the jab has to score. As long as the opponent is taking committal action to defend against it, then those reactions can be used against him. But if the opponent doesn’t respect the jab to begin with, then the setups just won’t work. He must be made to respect it.

Although Van did react to Royval’s lead hand throughout the first round, he never had to commit much to the effort; he was able to evade the jab with miniscule pulls, or check it with small parries—that was, when he wasn’t just watching it fall short. When Royval tried to set something up with his lead hand, therefore, Van could more or less ignore the noise and focus on the real threat behind it.

Here Royval tries to set up a cross-uppercut combination with the jab, but Van keeps checking his lead hand with his own. Royval sees is as an opportunity. Van isn’t doing any attacking of his own, just reacting. Royval steps in behind the next jab, loading up a left hand followed by a right uppercut. Of course, as Royval’s corner will soon point out, that left hand is exactly what Van is waiting for. He slips, slapping with a throwaway hook as he does, and then comes back with a hard right hand to the chin.

Royval’s mistake here was thinking that he had set Van up for something with his lead hand, when in reality Van did not regard those jabs as any kind of threat. Worse, those ineffectual jabs are actually helping Van out, giving him a feel for the distance. The jab is, among its many other uses, a range-finding tool. But that utility can go both ways.

This is a concept Chad Mendes used to exploit, back in his title contention days. A short man, Mendes had few long-range weapons in his arsenal. But he was an excellent counter puncher with a seriously explosive step-in. And so Mendes would hang around on the end of his opponent’s reach, fending off jabs with the right hand he kept holstered close to his chin. The moment he felt the opponent really plant one in his palm, he knew he was close enough to hit them back, and he would dash forward to land his devastating hooks.

That’s pretty much what happens here, except Van doesn’t even have to dash forward to score.

The problem in round one were not Royval’s combinations, but his set-ups. Van had no respect for his jab, and so all it did was give away free intel. Once Royval focused on using the jab as a weapon in its own right, everything changed.

Right away you can see the difference. No metronomic game of patty-cake here. Royval extends the jab halfway, and Van reaches to intercept it. So Royval changes the timing: he takes a short step forward and then fires the jab. Van mistimes the catch, has to pull to evade. Royval gives him another feint, doesn’t get anything, and decides to reset.

Van gets on the pressure, but now Royval lets him get a little closer before sticking him with yet another jab. It stops Van’s advance at once, forces his weight onto the back foot. Van tries to resume the handfight—but now he isn’t comfortably catching Royval’s jab, he’s chasing it. Now it becomes possible to set him up. Royval gives him a feint, closing in behind it to fire a cross. Van slips it, feels another shot coming after, but now that Royval has the tempo on him, he has to guess. He tries to cover all his bases by extending the left arm, elbow raised, in what Jack Dempsey used to call a glance-off. A good way of jamming up a lead hook, but a piss-poor defense against the uppercut that slips right underneath his arm and finds his chin.

If the first round was the story of Joshua Van’s flawless sense of distance, then the second round was the tale of how Brandon Royval took it away from him. With the jab doing its job, the left hand that Van had countered so blithely in the first round suddenly became a problem. We’ll finish off the first part of this analysis with a little compilation of the straight lefts Royval landed throughout the second.

You may notice that every one of these shots is preceded by either a jab, or some kind of jab feint. Yet in strong contrast to the examples we saw from round one, these threats are actually effective. The first one to land clean (fight clock starting at 3:47) sees Van already respecting the jab well enough that he tries countering it, stepping in and slipping outside to land a left hand, Pacquiao-style. Of course, the jab he wants to punish is only a feint, and he winds up throwing his face into the path of Royval’s left hand before he can get his shot off. When Van then goes back to countering the left hand, Royval’s jab feint gets him close enough, and in good time, to catch him mid-slip.

Royval has gotten a lot of credit for the toughness he showed in this fight, and rightly so. We’ll have more opportunity to goggle at his courage and his chin both in the next part of this analysis. But I’m happy to close out part one with a focus on his craft.

After UFC 317, Royval took to social media to give his thoughts on the fight. “A tale of ‘the scorpion and the frog,’” he wrote on Instagram. “Some individuals are driven by uncontrollable instincts, even when those instincts lead to self-destructive or harmful actions. Wish I could change but I’ve always been this way.”

I feel for him. However, to say that the fight turned out the way it did simply because Royval could not maintain the discipline his coaches asked for would be a lie. Joshua Van won this fight just as much as Brandon Royval lost it, and it’s not like discipline and craft were the only things that put Royval in the running to begin with. We’ll talk about all of that and more in part two.