UFC 290 Beforemath: What New City Kickboxing Tricks Will Alexander Volkanovski Bring?

It’s always a great week when Alexander Volkanovski fights. The people’s pound-for pound-king returns to headline UFC 290 and looks to deny Yair Rodriguez the chance to unify his interim featherweight title. For today’s edition of Beforemath, we are taking a look at Volkanovski and his team at City Kickboxing. This is not a slight to Yair Rodriguez, who we will not be focusing on today. This is a testament to how good the team at City Kickboxing truly is.

Making an Adaptive Game Plan

Volkanovski has fought the most diverse cast of athletes in mixed martial arts other than Jon Jones. Going through his record, one will see just how hard Volkanovski’s path in the UFC has been, and it all came to a head against Islam Makhachev, a fight many thought he’d won. Now Volkanovski returns to his kingdom and takes on a fighter that is different from all of the fighters he’s faced. Yair Rodriguez has an incredibly realistic chance to win this fight and become a third undisputed Mexican champion. But Volkanovski will not be taking him lightly.

With Volkanovski having an equal reach to Rodriguez, measuring 71” for both, the range is always somewhere a classic Volkanovski fight starts out. With a good, stiff jab leading the way, Volkanovski often eats his opponents up with said jab. While the jab is important against Rodriguez and his blistering speed, it is a dangerous strike to rely on exclusively. Volkanovski likes to rely on his speed and famously told Holloway in the third fight that he was, “Just too slow.” Rodriguez will not be slow at the start of the fight.

Against Jose Aldo, we saw an Volkanovski take on a faster fighter. His game plan there was to utilize plenty of feints to try to get Aldo to react. While Aldo wasn’t as reactive as Rodriguez will be. I fully expect to see a feint-heavy Volkanovski. Keeping Rodriguez off of him early on will be another area to look at for Volkanovski. To view what City Kickboxing has cooked up for this, we take a look at Israel Adesanya in his fourth fight with Alex Pereira.

With Pereira walking forward like The Terminator, Adesanya had to keep the Brazilian champion off of him and make advancement as hard as possible. To do this, Adesanya used the push kick as Pereira came forward. This works as a two-pronged attack for Volkanovski, who will want to both keep Rodriguez at bay and hit the midsection to break the gas tank open and take his opponent into the deeper parts of the fight where he thrives.

As Volkanovski works the body, also look for him to neutralize the mobility of Rodriguez too. Fast and powerful, Rodriguez relies on his legs to get him into and out of range while generating his power at the same time. As we always talk about, kicking the legs is something every modern MMA fighter should be doing. Rodriguez is great at this and when the fight calls for a low kick, he pours it on. Against Holloway, Rodriguez went 57 of 64 to the legs to slow Holloway down. Volkanovski will want to get to him first and start to wear down his mobility all while crowding the kicker to make sure Rodriguez can’t get the kicks off himself. Volkanovski is no stranger to the calf kick. He used it to great effect against Holloway in all three of their fights. To mix things up, Volkanovski utilizes both the lead step up kick and the rear roundhouse kick out of both orthodox and southpaw.

Seen in the figure above, the step-up low kick (1 & 2) involves Volkanovski bringing his rear foot forward to enter range and land a kick with his lead leg. (3 & 4) The Roundhouse or “Thai style” is the more traditional low kick where Volkanovski will plant on his lead foot and bring the rear leg all the way around and crash into the legs. These two both attack the legs, although the first attacks the outside of the calf and the latter the inside. Both will hurt the mobility of Rodriguez and also allow Volkanovski to snatch up a few single-legs to get the fight to the ground where he can really damage Rodriguez.

Wrestling may seem like a great idea for Volkanovski and I fully expect to see the Aussie wrestle against the cage and on the ground. Pushing Rodriguez against the cage will slow him down, tire him out, and allow Volkanovski to work the body and land some elbows on the break.

When watching Rodriguez fight Josh Emmett for the interim title, bodywork was a big part of winning the fight. Rodriguez stepped up the pressure in the second round and landed kick after kick to the midsection and took the wind out of Emmett early. Volkanovski will want to be sure to catch these kicks early and get Rodriguez to the ground and control him while he’s there. Rodriguez creates a lot out of his scrambles and allowing him to squirm his way to the back or out of the takedown all together would be a waste of energy for Volkanovski.

A Love Letter to Izzy

At the end of the day, Alexander Volkanovski is going to have to ding up Rodriguez on the feet. To see how City Kickboxing deals with explosive strikers with a lot of power, we go again, to Adesanya taking on Pereira. Adesanya and Volkanovski are, of course, teammates and have a lot of the same tendencies that can carry over to each other’s fighting style. In their title rematch, Adesanya wanted to work the body of Pereira to set up the shots up top. Knowing Pereira could go for five rounds with his low output style, Adesanya made it a point to tag the body.

Knowing that the left hook was always looming, Adesanya (1) pokes out a probing jab from orthodox to gauge whether Pereira was going to throw the left hook or not. The left jab to the body lets Adesanya keep his right hand at home in case the hook were to come. But Pereira wouldn’t throw the hook and dropped his hands to block the punch to the body instead. Adesanya would (2) sneak around the left side of Pereira’s arms with a right and Pereira would begin to back up off the blitz. To get the power hand chambered up and ready to fire, Adesanya (3) throws another left hook and this allows him to bring the right hand back and (4) over the top landing on Pereira. This works so well because of the work to the body. Pereira drops his hands to block the shots down low and has to get his hands back up for the right in time, something he couldn’t do.

Another example from City Kickboxing and Adesanya is the hand fighting Adesanya did consistently against Pereira in their two MMA fights. There, Adesanya tried to bring down the hands of Pereira and open a lane for the cross. If you remember back to the end of Round 1 of the first MMA fight, you’ll remember that Adesanya really stunned Pereira who was saved by the bell.

As Pereira came forward, (1) Adesanya threw a long jab and snaps Pereira’s head backwards. Instead of retracting this punch, (2) Adesanya leaves it hanging out there and will pull down the left hand of Pereira. This takes the left hook out of play and opens up (3) the right cross. This was so effective the first time that (4) Pereira was nearly finished in the first.

These types of tricks are some things I look to see from Volkanovski. Pair these new things with all of his usual tricks like switching stances, ground and pound, exiting on an angle, all stuff we’ve talked about in the past. But Rodriguez is a dangerous fighter and one Volkanovski will not take lightly. After being defeated by Makhachev, we’re bound to see a Volkanovski that’s better and scarier for the UFC’s featherweight division, or one that’s lost his edge because of how tough of a battle he went through. The only way to find out is for Volkanovski to be locked in a cage with Rodriguez and fight for his title and fight for his legacy.