Move over Magomed Ankalaev, there's a new choke artist in town
Magomed Ankalaev had the same fight he always has at UFC 313. No one was surprised, except Alex Pereira.
Did anyone else wake up Sunday morning with the sickly sensation that something had been lost overnight? At first I thought Daylight Saving Time was to blame.
Then it all came back to me.
Yes, we are now on the other side (some might say the wrong side) of UFC 313. An event that looked merely okay on paper was considerably worse in practice, but even if it wasn’t altogether entertaining, Alex Pereira vs Magomed Ankalaev was certainly an interesting main event. While thousands of people were struggling to get the broken ESPN app to function, those clever enough to find a pirated stream were blessed to witness the cold, gray dawn of the Magomed Ankalaev Era.
The fight started, predictably enough, with a mutual feeling-out process. Pereira started chopping at Ankalaev’s legs, to good effect. Ankalaev responded in the appropriate way: moving forward, trying to take space away from the kicker. He also tested Pereira’s takedown defense, which proved to be much sturdier than in the past.
Heading into round two, I was ready to watch the gameplans unfold. Indeed, that was what happened—but not quite in the way I expected. Ankalaev increased the pressure, clearly the crux of his strategy. He smothered Pereira’s lead hand with his own, neutralizing the champion’s dangerous jab. Pereira, on the other hand, stuck to the low kicks, though already they were getting him into trouble in the face of Ankalaev’s pressure. Nevertheless he seemed content to let Ankalaev push him around at range, continually giving ground whenever the challenger even hinted at stepping into the pocket.
I spent most of the rest of the fight waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for Ankalaev to take his eye off the ball and give Pereira the chance he needed; or, failing that, for Pereira to bite the bullet and meet the counter puncher in the pocket. What was the next stage of Poatan’s plan? What cards was he keeping so carefully concealed? The longer the fight went on, the more urgent his situation became. Sooner or later, he would have to show something.
It was only with the onset of round four that I realized: this was it. Land leg kicks, defend takedowns: that was the sum total of Pereira’s gameplan. He wasn’t playing it close to the vest. He had already shown his hand, all the way back in round one. He had nothing else prepared.
Where did it all go wrong?
A failure of footwork
Ankalaev was not the first UFC fighter to pressure Pereira, but he was the first to have any particular affinity for it. Israel Adesanya tried, but couldn’t keep it up. Jiri Prochazka tried, but couldn’t restrain himself. Ankalaev, on the other hand, is actually pretty good at pressure fighting, at least as long as his focus lasts. He knows how to cut off the cage. He uses his kicks to punish opponents who insist on running along the fence. Most importantly, he actually enjoys being the bully, unlike Adesanya—but not too much, like Prochazka.
As it happened, Pereira was ill-equipped to handle that kind of fight. Probably I should have seen that coming, given the difficulty Pereira had with Artem Vakhitov back in his kickboxing days; but then, Vakhitov is a high-output swarmer, and Magomed Ankalaev is… well, he’s shy.
The crux of the problem was Pereira’s footwork. Virtually every time Ankalaev advanced, Pereira gave ground. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but in Pereira’s case it was untenable. His defensive footwork, as it turns out, is incompatible with his offense.
Take a look.
This whimsical, bounding movement is called a hop-step.
Now the hop-step is one of those moves that breaks the rules. Normally, fighters are taught to move in what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, a scuttle: when moving to the right, the right foot moves first; when moving backwards, the back foot moves first; and so on. That’s the basic step, in virtually every combat sport. The idea is that you widen your stance with the leading foot, then adjust the trailing foot to regain your original position. In this way, you avoid crossing your feet, or bringing them together, both of which compromise the stance’s structural integrity. If you get hit with your feet well spaced, you stand a good chance of absorbing the impact; if you get hit with your feet together, you’re probably getting hurt.
Of course, as with many principles of proper technique, there is a compromise here. Scuttling about like a crab is actually a pretty inefficient means of getting around, considerably slower (but considerably safer) than walking.
The hop-step allows you to get around more quickly than with a scuttle, but more safely than with a natural stride. It works like this: when executing a backwards hop-step, the fighter brings his lead foot back towards his rear foot. Then, before the lead foot has actually touched back down, he moves the rear foot. The result is a quick, skipping movement during which, for just a moment, the fighter has both feet off the ground at once.
Executed well, this maneuver can create a sudden gap in front of an advancing opponent, and the built-in transfer of weight from back to front lends itself to a surprisingly hard cross. This makes it an excellent tool for counter punching. If you remember Conor McGregor’s knockout of Jose Aldo, then you know what I’m talking about. Not everyone is Conor McGregor, however: it’s very difficult to get the timing just right. What’s more, it’s the kind of counter you drop on an opponent who lunges recklessly forward. Against a measured, patient pressure fighter like Magomed Ankalaev, the opening won’t be there.
The point is, the hop-step is an alternative to the standard scuttle, not a replacement. It lets you cover a lot of ground quickly without abandoning your stance. Oftentimes, however, what’s needed are small, precise steps. Keeping one foot in contact with the ground at all times doesn’t just make a fighter harder to knock around, it means he retains the ability to throw a punch at any moment—even if he has not yet finished the maneuver. This kind of footwork may feel awkward and stiff at times, but tactically it is the most flexible way of moving around the cage. It keeps the options open.
But somehow Pereira didn’t seem to know how to do it. Every single time Ankalaev got too close for comfort, he would skip away like Edson Barboza fighting his sleep paralysis demon. He was clearly uncomfortable allowing Ankalaev into the pocket, but thanks to his footwork, he inadvertently made sure that the pocket kept coming to him, over and over again, only he was never settled in time to do anything about it.
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