AMANDA Nunes is riding high as the UFC women’s bantamweight and featherweight champion and she stands to make history again this weekend as she takes on Holly Holm.
“History” in this instance is of course a grand total of less than ten years, as the UFC’s women’s divisions are their youngest, but with a win here Nunes would have beaten all three previous holders of the UFC bantamweight title.
This will be Holm’s second title fight in the last two years, despite boasting just two wins in her last six outings. Holm is here partly because there aren’t many bantamweights to write home about, and partly because the UFC still love her and she can draw pretty well based off the name recognition she got for knocking out Ronda Rousey.
With that healthy dollop of cynicism out of the way up front, we can also admit that Holm provides an interesting match up for Nunes. Nunes obliterated the sloppy Ronda Rousey and quickly overwhelmed the dangerous but reckless Cyborg Justino, yet put in her least convincing performance against the cautious and tricky Valentina Shevchenko. Holm has always been a mobile target, from her boxing performances to her MMA fights, she runs a 5k every time she steps foot on the canvas.
Holm’s fight against Cyborg is remembered as Cyborg’s greatest victory, but it also showed us some interesting aspects of Holm’s game and character. Firstly, Cyborg surprised Holm with her effective ring cutting and quality counter punching. Cyborg’s powerful and well-timed counters sent Holm into a one-note performance, circling to her left every time and then jumping back in with the left straight—scoring perfectly before reliably eating a counter.
Where Holm found more success was scoring this left straight and immediately grabbing double underhooks and holding tight. Rather than staying out of the clinch she was actually surprisingly strong there—she made no offensive progress from there but it was assumed that the clinch would be Cyborg territory and that proved to be completely false.
In Holm’s most recent performance she seemed to have come to the conclusion that all the work she had put into her wrestling was going to waste by being used completely defensively. Instead of her usual jog-and-punch performance we got three rounds of domination on the mat.
Nunes’ success stems from her booming right hand and her thudding right low kick. Often thrown below the knee it is that kind of low-low kick that has caught on because it is so hard for the opponent to turn into a takedown. But this look isn’t as readily available against southpaws like Valentina Shevchenko and the challenger, Holm, as Nunes would kick straight into the shin—a no-win connection. Nunes did make good use of front kicks to the midsection with her right leg against the southpaw Shevchenko.
The weakness that plagued much of Nunes’ career was her cardio. She gassed out hard against Cat Zingano, and in the later stages of her first fight with Valentina Shevchenko. It makes sense, she’s an extremely heavy hitter and that takes a lot of effort. But dragging someone into the fifth round doesn’t automatically make them tired, as Shevchenko found out in the rematch where Nunes was scarcely made to work at all through the earlier rounds. Holm’s cardio has always been top notch but bringing it to level in this fight will require her to make Nunes work, and that means gritting your teeth and risking the big punch.
