UFC 241: Diaz vs Pettis - two flawed fighters who know just how to exploit each other

UFC 241: Diaz vs Pettis - two flawed fighters who know just how to exploit each other

Our UFC expert Jack Slack goes through the card on what promises to be an explosive night in California.

STIPE Miocic might have the best jab in the heavyweight division and it is certainly among the few educated jabs you will see in mixed martial arts. Against enormous, swinging counter punchers like Mark Hunt and Francis Ngannou, it was Miocic’s skilled use of the jab and his feints that carried him to victory. Every shrug of the shoulder or nod of the head had those counter punchers swinging at air, and when they began holding back, Miocic would hit them for real whether it was needling them with the jab, kicking at their legs, or throwing the big right hand that earned him recognition with the masses.

Daniel Cormier is not particularly heralded as a striker and certainly isn’t a textbook technician and yet he was able to take Miocic’s jab out of the equation almost entirely. In recent years Cormier has given up trying to be a good textbook striker altogether and started finding stuff that works for him.

Cormier’s hands are always out in front of him, checking his opponent’s hands and forcing them to come around the side. When the opponent throws their right hand, Cormier throws his left arm straight over their right shoulder and bars the shot. This is the oldest block in boxing and yet it is still working for Cormier.

By barring the right hand Cormier can slide in on his opponent and throw his arm over their back and clinch them. Even if he doesn’t have the underhook, Cormier can move and pummel for the overhook from there—the clinch is the hard part to get when everyone is aware that you are an Olympic quality wrestler. Miocic, being cautious of Cormier’s wrestling, would drop his hips back and break from the clinch each time he could but this would lead to Cormier grabbing him behind the head or sneaking through on an underhook and catching him with a sneaker right hand on every break, eventually knocking Miocic out in this way.

If Miocic wants to perform better in this matchup he needs to either find a way to land his jab and right hand—tough to do while Cormier’s palms are obstructing—or start throwing to the openings that are actually there. Cormier’s reaching and obstructing leaves his sides wide open and he has always taken a body shot very poorly. Frank Mir and Josh Barnett produced overreactions by hitting Cormier’s body infrequently, and Jon Jones significantly slowed Cormier with bodywork before high kicking him as Cormier was reaching down to deal with it. Miocic isn’t a particularly active kicker but with left and right hands to the body, he could really slow Cormier down while assuring himself underhooks as Cormier entered to clinch.

FULL UFC241 BETTING 

Additionally, Cormier’s barring posture (sometimes referred to as his “dabbing” technique) leaves him exposed to a number of other strikes. The head is a red herring for the most part—Volkan Oezdemir kept shooting left hooks and uppercuts to Cormier’s head as he ducked down but didn’t hit much. However, combination striking into left middle kicks (that would meet Cormier’s lowered head) or into a collar tie/cross face and a left knee might work well. More important is that Cormier is side on and in a long stance when he does this: there is next to no chance of him checking a low kick and Miocic got off hard low kicks successfully in the first fight when he seemed to throw them on a whim. Feints and non-committal strikes into low kicks could be a game-changer for Miocic in this bout.

Perhaps the most important change that Miocic can make to his game is to not panic when Cormier throws the arm over his shoulder or ducks in to clinch. In the first match, Miocic immediately worked to break from the clinch and was hit on each break. However, when Miocic drove into the fence and used his underhooks to control Cormier, he did an excellent job despite lacking Cormier’s wrestling accolades. If Cormier is going to give up an inferior clinching position, Miocic should make the most of it instead of backing straight out. It might be boring to hold an opponent to the fence for half around, but it would at least put the breaks on that tactic and chalk up some points on the board for Miocic.

Diaz vs Pettis

The circumstances of Nate Diaz’s return are about as strange as you could hope for. He meets Anthony Pettis—a career lightweight who very recently went down to featherweight—at welterweight, in a fight which will likely have most of its ramifications at lightweight.

Since fighting Conor McGregor a second time in the UFC’s biggest selling fight to that point, Diaz has sat on his hands and waited on the call for the rubber match. Unfortunately, it never came. It was a case of the UFC refusing to believe he was any part of why the McGregor – Diaz rematch was for some time their biggest selling fight ever, and Diaz refusing to accept that the UFC could continue making money in spite of themselves while he could not. Diaz finally came around and was booked to return against Dustin Poirier a few months back but a Poirier injury scuppered that booking. Poirier is now going into a lightweight title fight with Khabib Nurmagomedov and Diaz is still hoping to slot back in somewhere in the division without having been around.

The reason that Nate Diaz versus Anthony Pettis is such a peculiar match up is that both men have such well-established flaws, and both fighters’ flaws play into the strengths of the other man. Anthony Pettis loathes pressure. He won the lightweight title in 2013, just after Nate Diaz’s failed shot at that belt, and for a while, it seemed like Pettis was going to be the lightweight to define the generation. Then he met Rafael dos Anjos, who put him through a five-round pressure cooker in 2015, and Pettis was so thoroughly worked out that he hasn’t won two on the trot since.

As a spectacular kicker, Pettis cannot get his A-game going nearly as effectively when he is backing up, and he struggles to avoid being walked to the fence. Moreover, he tends to tire quickly when placed on the back foot and hand injuries mean that he struggles to power punch his way out of trouble.

Nate Diaz is most famous for walking down Conor McGregor, Donald Cerrone and others, covering up as they threw their punches and throwing his own one-twos back in tremendous volume. Diaz doesn’t dig to the body as often as his older brother, Nick, but will sprinkle bodywork in and drives a high enough pace that it is enough to tire opponents out on its own.

Diaz’s problems are similar to his older brother’s: they have very strong beliefs about what should constitute winning a fight, and these don’t match the scoring criteria. They also refuse to actually adapt once their issues are established. Most obviously, both men fight from a very boxing-centric stance—almost side on with their lead foot toed in—and advance on a straight line. This means that the standard tactic to defusing either Diaz has been to either tap or punt their lead leg out and step off-line as they reset their balance.

It worked for Donald Cerrone when he finally remembered to do it against Nate back in 2011, and it worked just as well when Conor McGregor used it almost exclusively to win their second fight. Rafael dos Anjos and Benson Henderson both beat Diaz with low kicks, movement and a bit more wrestling. And Josh Thompson—the only man to knock Diaz out—did it by running laps of the cage, throwing in low kicks, and then going high and kicking Diaz in the head.

Ultimately, the fight seems to come down to whether Pettis can get off the line of attack or whether he gets held under and drowned by Diaz’s incredible pace. While you might see a bit of Diaz’s usual smushing and hitting along the fence, he’s unlikely to try to simply pin Pettis in place or hit short double legs and hold him down as Eddie Alvarez and Clay Guida did—though a ground fight between these two could easily be fight of the night material with both men’s incredible record of submissions and sweeps.

Do you want to be informed about bookmakers' latest promotions? Click  and subscribe!