TYRON Woodley and Kamaru Usman represent two distinct applications of wrestling in mixed martial arts. While wrestling is routinely touted as the single most important skill in MMA, getting it to actually work against men who are training every day to stop it, is actually a pretty difficult task. Everyone who makes it to the UFC can stop a shot if they know it is coming. For this reason, wrestling in MMA has gone through various phases and now the great wrestlers of MMA tend to fall into one of several different styles.
Kamaru Usman’s approach to wrestling in MMA is to brute force it. He wants his opponent on the mat and he refuses to take a step back. Consequently, Usman’s game is all about the fence. Usman’s takedowns almost never come out in the open and instead he will get to the fence typically in one of two ways. Often will pick up a single leg and simply run the opponent towards the fence, not really concerning himself with completing the takedown.
Other times, he will drive head first into a clinch and simply try to sumo his opponent to the cage wall. This normally takes some serious commitment from Usman, who can be seen leaning heavily into opponents and clinging onto the remnants of underhooks with just his fingertips digging into his opponent’s latissimus dorsi.
Along the fence, Usman’s offence is varied and creative, but most importantly it is relentless. Sometimes he will be able to reap out a leg and fall on top of his opponent, other times he will drop on a short double leg and simply sit them to their rump, and sometimes you will see him smash his way inside of his opponent’s knees, pinning their hips against the wall as he reaches down and tries to pull out their one weighted foot.
The fence is a double-edged sword for the wrestler: when Usman was competing in NCAA Division II, he never had the luxury of a solid surface behind his opponent to prevent them from retreating or sprawling their hips back. On the other hand, everyone in the UFC knows how to wall walk and if you take them down next to the fence that is exactly what they will attempt to do. So Usman’s fights against good opponents have been a constant process of getting to the fence, fighting to achieve the takedown, fighting to keep the fight on the mat, and then the opponent popping up and him having to do the same thing again. Khabib Nurmagomedov’s overall strategy can be summed up in exactly the same sentence, but Nurmagomedov is bludgeoning his man with punches from every position, Usman hits about half as often as Nurmagomedov and is more concerned with simply blanketing opponents.
When Tyron Woodley pursues the takedown he often likes to shoot into space rather than onto the fence to avoid this prolonged up and down struggle. This is why you will often see Woodley stand with his back foot almost grazing the fence. In terms of ringcraft, this is generally a taboo—you are cutting off your ability to retreat and giving the opponent the opportunity to step in on you. But for Woodley and others such as Rustam Khabilov, standing on the fence is an invitation. When the opponent commits, Woodley drives through on a takedown and lands them on their back, in the centre of the cage with ten feet of space between them and the cage wall.
The difference that most fight fans are expecting is in the striking. Woodley has a thunderous right hand and can time a good counter (as Darren Till will begrudgingly attest). Under Henry Hooft, Usman has matured into an awkward switch hitter who can make use of a good jab and some nice kicks when he feels confident enough to throw. The problem is that Usman’s striking has largely been done once he has already spent a round or two pursuing the takedown – we have no idea whether he will be comfortable enough to strike effectively if he can’t get his opponent down or if he is worried about being put on his back himself.
If Usman can begin applying his jab and his switch-hitting and throw with volume and plenty of feints, it is plausible that he could trouble Woodley who, while great with his low kicks and big right hand, is still pretty minimalist on the feet. The problem is that while feinting and volume striking throw off counterpunching, even very good fighters can fall into only feinting and then taking a moment to psyche themselves up before attacking with a very obvious lead. Darren Till spent the entire first round of his fight with Woodley feinting, then came out for the second having been psyched up by his corner and threw for real, immediately getting hammered with a pull counter as a result. To beat a good counter puncher you have to be able to convince them that the feints are real and the real strikes are just feints. This takes the kind of confidence that often disappears when faced with the reality of a hitter like Woodley.
One area to watch in this fight is striking on the breaks from clinches. Usman, like Nurmagomedov, has been stifled most effectively when his opponent can prevent him from achieving a body lock along the fence, and short periods of his fights against some opponents have turned into Usman pinning his opponent to the fence with chest pressure and no effective grips. It will be fascinating to see if a wrestler of Woodley’s pedigree—who is unlikely to simply be short double legged when Usman is losing the hand fight— can beat the grips, angle off the fence and strike effectively as he breaks. Usman himself loves elbows on the breaks, but with how heavily he commits his head to leaning on his opponents he could be especially vulnerable here.
