Chael Sonnen said it well when, as a wrestler, he described his take down attack as starting from the outside. But Rousey, as a judo specialist, she needs to get her hands on you first, a big difference.
Rousey had no plan to mix things up to eliminate the space, to get a hold of Holms, and once her remedial methods failed, she was lost.
Just watched it again, its amazing how fast Ronda's face turned red from the shots. She was also so gassed so quickly.
No way in hell someone that puts in almost zero time with wrestling, is going to hit a shot on someone like Holm that wants to dictate the fight.Yeah, but she's not going to move straight in for a clinch, against somebody who's got great boxing skills, that was my point. Just because she's a judo pro doesn't mean she can't wrestle. You don't just walk up to somebody and get double unders, you have to move and strike your way in. Hence, why shooting in for take downs might have worked a bit better.
No way in hell someone that puts in almost zero time with wrestling, is going to hit a shot on someone like Holm that wants to dictate the fight.
Ronda had zero chance of hitting a shot from the outside. Or of being able to chain wrestle through a failed attempt. Hitting an ankle pick, knee tap, switching between doubles and singles, that takes years of hard training. And being an Olympic medalist Judoka why would she train wrestling, when she needs to keep practicing/adapting Judo for no-gi? One of my coaches (nidan in Judo, trained at the Kodokan for 2 years) struggles with guys in no-gi, that he rag dolls during gi.
Not addressing you personally, but this is not a video game people. You do not just spam whatever technique is the best for the situation. You ride the horse what brought ya. You do not get to be good at wrestling for MMA overnight. And I think 5 will get you 500 she hardly dabbles with wrestling takedowns. Trying to hit them on someone used to far better wrestlers? Good luck with that.
exactly. She is not a wrestler she is a judo expert. she NEEDS to be in the clinch for her to throw you to the ground.
Holmes wasn't getting into the clinch. she was hitting and running.
RRR has not got beyond a basic gameplan. She needs to learn some wrestling and better defense in boxing.
wich is why many are calling for her to change camps.
exactly. She is not a wrestler she is a judo expert. she NEEDS to be in the clinch for her to throw you to the ground.
Holmes wasn't getting into the clinch. she was hitting and running.
RRR has not got beyond a basic gameplan. She needs to learn some wrestling and better defense in boxing.
wich is why many are calling for her to change camps.
The bull and the matador. It is the metaphor of choice for writer after hackey writer. Yet it is one which you can slap on a write up of Holm versus Rousey and it will seem completely apt. A bullfight, as Hemingway put it, is not a contest but a tragedy. The odds are stacked against the bull and the more aggressively he fights, the more he will exhaust himself. But once he slows, he's dead. Not many predicted that Ronda Rousey would suffer the same fate.
The 'fight' was a beautiful execution. Rousey was never in the game as Holm danced around her, angled off from her clumsy charges, and skewered her with left straights. The end came just a minute into the second round as Holm connected with her left high kick and sent Rousey to the canvas, unconscious.
The storm of uneducated opinion in the wake of the fight has been deafening and everyone wants to pretend that they always knew how to beat Rousey, they just didn't know if Holm was the 'level of athlete' to pull it off. When someone starts talking about 'A-level athletes' and ranking fighters by 'athleticism', you should immediately disregard their opinion on anything related to fighting. Yes, Holm is a big woman for her weightclass, and holds terrific endurance, but it was her discipline, her form, and her patience which won her this fight. Her choices and composition and not her 'athleticism'.
The second moronic opinion that you will encounter is that Rousey lost because she chose to engage Holly Holm in a striking match. This fits nicely into the storyline of Rousey falling in love with her hands, being put on the cover of Ring magazine to sell copies, and so on. But it isn't true. Those who have actually followed the MMA game for a while now know that while 'striking' and 'grappling' are categorizations we make to break the sport down into understandable chunks, they are not removed from each other. Rousey's entire game is built around the clinch, and she has to get chest to chest with the opponent to achieve that.We discussed this five months ago in Killing the Queen: Ronda Rousey.
Everything that I laid out in that article, and everything which Holly Holm did to hurt Rousey, stems off of the fact that she only has one means of getting to the clinch—moving straight in. Boxing into the clinch is so important in MMA and those two elements alone can often guarantee high level success. Randy Couture is a terrific example, Chris Weidman is perhaps the best example in the game.
The problem is that Rousey isn't boxing into the clinch, she's running forward with punches into the clinch. The act of pumping ones hands isn't boxing. Boxing is done with the feet. Where Weidman will masterfully cut the cage and take space away—which you can see on full display in his bout with Lyoto Machida—Rousey will bullrush in. And it has worked because the women she has been fighting have panicked and stood still to throw punches back.
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What Weidman, and every other truly great offensive fighter has been able to do is cut off the ring. This means that when the opponent steps to your right, you step with your right foot to make sure you're still crowding them and vice versa. Stepping straight in is a commitment of the weight to an attack and just gives the opponent the opportunity to get away. Norman Mailer called it 'a balletic art' and it's true that there is a great deal more subtlety and grace to offensive footwork than the casual observer would imagine. For instance, notice here that while Lyoto Machida is doing exactly what the outfighter should do to get off the cage—changing direction and attempting to fake Weidman into committing to one side—it is Machida who is tiring himself out, doing all the extra work, while Weidman is just making small movements to keep The Dragon in front of him.
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Holm's performance took everything that was wrong with Rousey's aggression and used it against her. From the opening moments, Holm was circling, making it difficult for Rousey to get her feet set to run in as she usually does.
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The first meaningful blow of the fight came in Holm's usual changing of directions into the left straight, right uppercut, left straight combination which she leaned on throughout her boxing career. Circling to her left, she ran in with punches and was out on the right side before Rousey could respond.
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Every charge Rousey made, even when she connected with punches, she would wind up running straight past Holm as the challenger circled out. That is the difference between hitting the mitts a lot and learning the ring craft. A good boxer—or kickboxer for that matter—works to stay in position to hit when they want to continue hitting, or get away if they want to be safe. Rousey wanted to follow up into the clinch, or hit more, and she very rarely could.
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Just as expected, the act of actually sprinting after her opponent and having to do it more than once quickly tired Rousey. There were many who felt she could do simply do this into the fourth or fifth round, but keeping it up for one was exhausting enough.
It was great to see Holm go to kicks so effectively, and particularly straight kicks. Straight kicks are harder to catch than round kicks, particularly low line straight kicks to the knees, shins and front of the thighs. We noted in Killing the Queen that Rousey doesn't often grab legs, and even then you will probably never have seen an oblique kick caught in the UFC because they are fast, quickly retracted, and come in so low that a real stoop would be necessary. Holm used oblique kicks masterfully to jam Rousey as she set herself to charge in with punches—not just painful, but exhausting to be stopped when loading up attempts.
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As Rousey slowed down, the kicks became more frequent, and Holm even threw her favourite side kick to the body, something I thought would be far too slow to attempt against a grappler as dangerous as Rousey.
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No way in hell someone that puts in almost zero time with wrestling, is going to hit a shot on someone like Holm that wants to dictate the fight.
Ronda had zero chance of hitting a shot from the outside. Or of being able to chain wrestle through a failed attempt. Hitting an ankle pick, knee tap, switching between doubles and singles, that takes years of hard training. And being an Olympic medalist Judoka why would she train wrestling, when she needs to keep practicing/adapting Judo for no-gi? One of my coaches (nidan in Judo, trained at the Kodokan for 2 years) struggles with guys in no-gi, that he rag dolls during gi.
Not addressing you personally, but this is not a video game people. You do not just spam whatever technique is the best for the situation. You ride the horse what brought ya. You do not get to be good at wrestling for MMA overnight. And I think 5 will get you 500 she hardly dabbles with wrestling takedowns. Trying to hit them on someone used to far better wrestlers? Good luck with that.
I knew you trained, as I read you reference it, perhaps it was in H&F. And I hope I did not come off as condescending. I like Waggy, get frustrated when I read something way off about a post fight breakdown. And people continue to opine about it despite attempts to address it. It is no insult to anyone, we all miss the forest for all the trees blocking our view, sometimes.I get you and Waggy's point. I know it's not a video game, I have experience as well. Never stepped in the cage formally, but I've had fights lined up and opponents dropped out and they matched me up against somebody with a 5-0 record with 5 knockouts. I know how incredibly long and dedicated you have to train to even become good enough to win against another total amateur. I have trained against professional MMA fighters who have had ZERO wins out of like 15 fights, and they wiped the floor with me. But I'm also not a total rookie.
Anyway, my point was that as others said below, she basically is a 1 dimensional fighter, albeit probably the best at what she does. She HAD to have known Holly would be training the shit out of the clinch defenses, and working on her counter punching even harder. A strategy of "well, I'll just strike my way in and manage to get a hook in or press her against the cage" would be pretty naïve.
I assumed also that Ronda's trainers would have guessed that Holly would work those defenses a ton, and at least drill Ronda on some simple take down attempts... Something to get a hold of the chick. I know you can't become an elite Olympic wrestler over night, but Ronda is still a top tier women's athlete. Drilling single legs or a knee tap for hours a day, every day for weeks and months, could have yielded good enough results to do better than she did that night.
But I rest my case. I think Holly completely deserved that win.
Maybe it was just a complete losing battle for Ronda from the start.
I knew you trained, as I read you reference it, perhaps it was in H&F. And I hope I did not come off as condescending. I like Waggy, get frustrated when I read something way off about a post fight breakdown. And people continue to opine about it despite attempts to address it. It is no insult to anyone, we all miss the forest for all the trees blocking our view, sometimes.
The reason Rousey's camp did not make any adjustments to her approach is two fold.
One: if it ain't broke don't fix it. Elaboration - She imposed her will on a silver medalist wrestler. She ends fights faster than you can get a burger from the drive-thru. So again, why adjust anything in camp for a competitor that most think poses little threat because of the grappling disparity?
Two: She wins despite Count Chocula, not due to him. Her boxing bio-mechanics look wrong to me. And her stalking/pressure footwork is terrible. People always lament about telegraphing with the shoulders, but footwork can be every bit as obvious. I cannot even call her style boxing, it is brawling.
And she does not just need a new camp. She needs a reality check. I hope this fight was it. She has been living in Fantasy Land the last couple of years. This is her Rocky IIIWill she change camps and adapt. Or is she tailor made, and gonna get hurt. :awe:
I knew you trained, as I read you reference it, perhaps it was in H&F. And I hope I did not come off as condescending. I like Waggy, get frustrated when I read something way off about a post fight breakdown. And people continue to opine about it despite attempts to address it. It is no insult to anyone, we all miss the forest for all the trees blocking our view, sometimes.
The reason Rousey's camp did not make any adjustments to her approach is two fold.
One: if it ain't broke don't fix it. Elaboration - She imposed her will on a silver medalist wrestler. She ends fights faster than you can get a burger from the drive-thru. So again, why adjust anything in camp for a competitor that most think poses little threat because of the grappling disparity?
Two: She wins despite Count Chocula, not due to him. Her boxing bio-mechanics look wrong to me. And her stalking/pressure footwork is terrible. People always lament about telegraphing with the shoulders, but footwork can be every bit as obvious. I cannot even call her style boxing, it is brawling.
And she does not just need a new camp. She needs a reality check. I hope this fight was it. She has been living in Fantasy Land the last couple of years. This is her Rocky IIIWill she change camps and adapt. Or is she tailor made, and gonna get hurt. :awe:
