PROVIDED Israel Adesanya can get through Yoel Romero on Saturday night you can expect to see a great deal of promotional weight stacking up behind the young Nigerian Kiwi.
His title winning performance against Robert Whittaker was about as good as anyone could hope for and gave some substance to those favourable comparisons to Anderson Silva that Adesanya had already been drawing.
In that fight, Adesanya met a very respectable striker and all around technician in Whittaker, and made him seem about as helpless and lost as Silva made Forrest Griffin look all those years ago. When Adesanya finally came back with his counters, Whittaker hit the canvas. It seems as though Adesanya is on the cusp of super stardom and we are waiting for the moment he explodes through to the wider public.
But getting through Yoel Romero isn’t exactly easy. In fact at this point it is rather a thankless task because—as everyone who knows a little about mixed martial arts is keen to point out—Yoel Romero is on a two-fight losing streak. Indeed, Romero has gone 1-3 in his last four fights. This might be the best example to date of the record not quite telling the story though. Two of those losses were five round decisions against Robert Whittaker, who fought an absolute blinder—two of the best technical masterclasses ever shown in the cage—and still got through by the skin of his teeth and might have lost a few years of lucidity off the end of his life in the process.
Most recently Romero lost a close battle to Paulo Costa on the scorecards. Until that point Costa looked unstoppable and had overwhelmed everyone in front of him. He towered over Romero and seemed to outweigh him by a good margin on fight night. Costa seemed perfect for Romero, in the perfect place to pick up a good victory over the aged Cuban. Instead Costa pressured Romero to the fence from the get go, battered his body with kicks and unloaded salvoes designed to end the fight on any connection… and yet it was Costa who slowed down and was fighting to survive by the last round. Whether you believe that Romero is “natty” or not—there is something quite unreal about the 42-year-old Cuban. Whittaker—who was in primary school when Romero won his first world championship in wrestling—remarked that when he struck Romero it felt as though Romero was made out of steel.
While Romero’s trophy cabinet is full of wrestling prizes, his MMA career has been marked by a laid back style of knockout artistry. A round in Romero’s ideal fight will be four and a half minutes of non-contact, interspersed with bursts of ultra-violence. Everyone with an ounce of fight knowledge looks at the way Romero is built and the way he moves and insists he will run out of gas, except out of Romero’s seven UFC finishes, six of those have come in the third round. He is a master at slowing the pace of the bout and often isn’t forced to rely on his conditioning much at all. Whittaker and Costa managed to stay on Romero and force him to work throughout the rounds, but while Romero visibly slowed in the first Whittaker fight he seemed much less affected by the pace in the second. Romero thrived in the final round of the Costa fight, but then it was only a three rounder.
Israel Adesanya represents a stark contrast with Romero because he is a bubbling pot of activity throughout his fights. Not every time Adesanya leads is a full spirited attempt to murder the opponent, but Adesanya is always feinting, kicking, jabbing. There is always something going on and it wears on his opponent dreadfully as the fight progresses. In this way even the most defensively alert opponents start to miss things. It only takes one body kick to turn over into a high kick, or a misread shoulder feint to force a missed parry, and suddenly the fight is over. Robert Whittaker’s frantic performance in the title fight might have viewers thinking Adesanya is just going to sit back and counter, but Adesanya at his best is about scoring frequently and capitalizing quickly if one of these scores shakes the opponent.
The difficulty for Adesanya is in straddling that line between recklessness and inactivity against a counter fighter as destructive as Romero. Against Anderson Silva—a very respectable counter fighter even in his old age—Adesanya had trouble keeping up the level of activity that he wanted and found himself falling into Silva’s game of playing to the judges and spreading out the engagements. Adesanya won a clear cut decision but many gave Silva a round, and that’s a lot to give up in just a three round fight. Against Romero, leaving him be for too long means losing the effects of keeping up the pace in the first place, and attacking him too regularly opens you up to either a catch-and-pitch counter or a well timed takedown attempt.
Adesanya's counters to hook kicks and low line side kicks could be crucial to the outcome of this fight
Ultimately a higher paced fight probably favours Adesanya's skill set. His ability to kick the body and retreat off line when the opponent returns with counters could turn this fight into an unpleasant slog for Romero. This skill alone should suitably separate him from Costa—who was just stood there to be hit after his own strikes. Getting to the body early and often, and keeping Romero under fire rather than casually bouncing around the cage, will increase Adesanya’s chances of getting a stoppage and take some of the speed and power out of Romero in the later going. Though Adesanya is best when hunting and sniping—should he overstay his welcome on the inside and start to involve himself in tit-for-tat exchanges, a higher pace becomes more of a detriment for Adesanya.
One interesting factor, should Adesanya not want to push a very high pace, is how it plays out if he stands back and allows Romero to lead. Romero has become fixated on the hook kick and the low line side kick. The hook kick hasn’t been a huge problem for his opponents (though he will sometimes turn into a backfist off it as Cung Le used to). The low line side kick obliterated Whittaker’s knee in the first minute of their first fight, and in the second the two men both leaned heavily on the kick—wanting to be the one to use it but not to receive it.
A lot of fighters were completely lost on the low line side kick for a while. Now more fighters are withdrawing the lead leg from the blow instead of trying to brace and take it, and it opens up the opportunity for a brutal high kick counter on the open side. Amanda Nunes famously knocked out Holly Holm with this counter, and Adesanya was looking to make use of it against Whittaker. As Romero throws himself completely into his side kicks, and they have wound up being one of his few weapons in the outfighting portion of a fight, this counter could end up playing a good role in the bout.
