Alexander the Great: A New Featherweight Contender Emerges in UFC

On Saturday night, Junior dos Santos worked his way through a predictable main event against Blagoy Ivanov in a televised card that probably isn’t making anyone’s top 15 of 2018. Yet on the undercard, to little applause, a featherweight contender emerged as Alexander Volkanovski convincingly put the number ten ranked Darren Elkins through the meat grinder. Volkanovski has been on our watch list since he turned up in the UFC in November of 2016, and back in February we took time to hype him up in our Hidden Gems of UFC 221 preview. Coming into MMA as a kickboxer, Volkanovski has built an all-offense style of striking and dirty boxing that might well be termed "kickboxing against the fence."

Volkanovski began the Elkins fight in his usual way, by applying pressure from the opening bell. Volkanovski’s disciplined feet played the lead and Elkins, seemingly not thinking about his, quickly ended up near the fence. With his retreat removed and the prospect of Volkanovski stepping in on him, Elkins did what almost everyone in MMA does when placed in bad ring position—he tried to bang his way out of it. Moving straight at Volkanovski with punches, Elkins found his target shrinking away from him, only to return over the top with a cross counter.

This is the trick that some of the best strikers in MMA have hit on in recent years. You need only look at Conor McGregor, who gets his opponent to the fence as quickly as possible and then waits for them to fight off. This exchange is as one sided as an exchange from closed guard—the man with his back to the center of the cage has all the control over the space between the two fighters. He can create and remove distance where the man on the fence can only attempt to remove it.

Here Sean O’Malley shows that the man in the center controls the distance.

And here he shows what you can do against an opponent concerned with fighting their way off the fence.

We examined this at length in March and it is largely the difference between hit-and-miss counter strikers like Lyoto Machida and Anderson Silva—even in their athletic primes—and the very consistent McGregor. Where the two aforementioned Brazilians were passive counter fighters, McGregor is more proactive, making his opponent fight back against his pressure and then countering.

But McGregor is about wheel kicks, body kicks and long left hands along the fence. Alexander Volkanovski actually enjoys the infight, pressed tight to the cage. Volkanovksi’s entries to clinches are fairly meat-and-potatoes. As his opponent circles to his left he will throw up lead leg round kicks or square his shoulders and leap in with the left hook, as they circle right he will throw the right hand. But Volkanovski has been using the Fedor Emelianenko Special—a right hand lead into a weave out to the right side—to initiate many of his clinches and against Darren Elkins it damn near ended the fight twice.

While this technique seems like the essence of mixed martial arts, it is actually an old boxing staple and part of a group of strategies termed “punch and clutch.” This is the act of throwing a power punch and moving in so as to fall into a clinch before the opponent can retaliate. If you miss it doesn’t matter because you’re already inside of countering range. If you land and the opponent’s knees turn to rubber, you can feel it and come out of the clinch punching. In MMA, however, the fight doesn’t stop at the clinch and so Emelianenko, Gunnar Nelson, and a few notable others have turned it into a much, much more effective method of “jab and shoot.”

On the subject of the jab, Volkanovski was making great use of a springing left straight throughout the fight to enter on his clinches as well. This was similar to something that Julio Cesar Chavez used to do, squaring his body and dropping down in his stance as if to leap for a left hook (or in Volkanovski’s case, perhaps a left high kick) then springing forward to smash his opponent with a jab which was really more of a power punch.

Many of Volkanovski’s previous opponents have been unable to stop him once they hit the fence. Volkanovski will hit an outside trip, or an inside reap, or drop down on a double leg and begin hitting them from the top. Some fighters get stuck underneath Volkanovski for periods, get beaten up, and then simply fall into a cycle of abuse as Jeremy Kennedy did in his last fight. But if Volkanovski can’t simply drag his man to the mat, it opens up more opportunities on the feet. He is a big proponent of the spinning back elbow that Jon Jones made famous from the clinch, freeing his hands and posting on his opponent with his head before initiating the turn.

Mizuto Hirota ended up getting clocked every time he tried to break away from the clinch. If you have read any of our previous articles you will know that everyone should be striking on the break from every clinch, all the time, always. Whether you are the man doing the breaking or trying to hold on, it works so well because the opponent’s hands must return from in front of their chest to their guard in less time than it takes to simply swing up a hook. The shifting southpaw right hook that Volkanovski showed is a beautiful punch to punish a circling fighter and one which George Foreman used to great success in boxing.

Darren Elkins is a good enough wrestler that Volkanovski was going to have a hard time taking him down. Rather than doggedly chase takedowns, Volkanovski would attempt a trip and then capitalize with a strike as Elkins caught his balance, or duck in on Elkins’s hips and then come up striking again.

A couple of nice inside trip to strike attempts.

Elkins, while traditionally not a great striker, did try some interesting things in this bout. He awkwardly hooked off the jab and was using a long right uppercut to set up his left middle kick. The uppercut is a great technique to set up body shots because it encourages opponents to stand up straight, stretching out their midriff to present as much target as possible. Typically you will see fighters like Nieky Holzken and Rico Verhoeven use the uppercut to set up the left hook to the liver. The longer uppercut needed to flow into a stepping body kick is the kind of uppercut which leaves the puncher open to every counter punch in the book, but it worked quite nicely in this bout. Alexander Gustafsson—the crown prince of long uppercuts—might make good use of this cheeky set up.

The mistimed takedown attempt is optional.

Alexander Volkanovski’s style made an interesting contrast with Chad Mendes’s. Mendes returned on Saturday night after a lengthy drug suspension, but blasted Myles Jury with no difficulty at all. It was the familiar Mendes: lazily circling the cage and drawing his opponent forward before storming back towards them with lightning fast haymakers. While Mendes has had great success against the majority of the featherweight division with only a couple of tools, you have to wonder whether a more aggressive approach to ring craft could help him, particularly with the slick counter punches he was showing against Jose Aldo in their second meeting. Furthermore his favorite level change to uppercut set up becomes a lot more threatening when the opponent has no space to retreat through, as Justin Gaethje has shown against the fence time and time again.

But now that Volkanovski has easily handled a top ten featherweight to surprisingly little applause, it is interesting to speculate on how he would match up against the UFC’s darling: Zabit Magomedsharipov. While Zabit’s grappling is slick and his kicks are flashy, his last fight revealed large shortcomings in his ringcraft and boxing as he seemed only capable of circling out in one direction, always with the same pivoting jab, exposing himself to right-handed counters. Volkanovski and Magomedsharipov are on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of featherweight physique, but with Volkanovski’s effective ring cutting and constant pressure that fight could be a terrifically entertaining one.

It is sad that Volkanovski ended up on the prelims on Saturday night, and many of those fans who tuned in for that fight probably felt more disappointed that the patented Elkins last-minute magic never showed up rather than impressed at how convincingly Volkanovski handled him. Whatever the case, Volkanovski is just another moving gear in a featherweight division which is both in turmoil—due to the uncertainty around the future of Max Holloway’s title—but also wide open. As young prospects like Volkanovski, Magomedsharipov, and Yair Rodriguez, and returning vets like Chad Mendes work themselves onto a collision course, the coming months promise to be a most marvelous kind of chaos in the featherweight division.

Jack wrote the hit biography Notorious: The Life and Fights of Conor McGregor and hosts the Fights Gone By Podcast.