Adjusting to the Octagon: Wanderlei’s Problem

There are old Pride fans that are going to look at this and get angry at me, people who are going to say that I’m just jumping off of the Wanderlei Silva bandwagon because he lost a few fights, he’s fallen on some hard times. So I’ll start by saying that that’s not what I mean when I say I’m skeptical about Wanderlei’s future in the UFC.

As far as I’m concerned, Wanderlei Silva was the dominant fighter in the world for years, and his streak in Pride is one of the impressive ever. His aggression and his ability to attack endlessly is amazing and it’s something that I think will define him as one of the greatest fighters who has ever stepped into a ring or a cage.

The fact is, though, as great a fighter as Wanderlei has been, the Octagon is not his home, and it is not where he’s comfortable. Frank Trigg once pointed out on an episode of FSN that one of the things that made Wanderlei so great in Pride was his ability to control space, his ability to lock down his opponents in the corners of the ring and his ability to make the ref stop the fight. Even as a Wanderlei fan, I can’t say that that incredible skill has translated to the UFC.

There’s no doubt in my mind that if Chuck Liddell and Wanderlei had met in Pride, the fight would have gone to Silva before the end of the first round. The problem is that there is something about the Octagon that just makes it incredibly difficult for Wanderlei to use his skills.

In his UFC career, Silva is 0-2 against two fighters who have thrived inside the Octagon. Tito Ortiz really never left the cage to fight anywhere else, and Liddell’s venture in the world with ropes had some disastrous consequences. Still, the fact that Silva was beaten by two fighters who might not have stood a chance on Silva’s home turf begs the question of whether the environment actually plays a roll in his game.

If you watch the way that Silva fights, it’s not immediately obvious that it does, but if you watch how he catches opponents in the corner with the clinch, how he traces his opponents movement off of the rope with such accuracy, it starts to make a little bit of sense. Let me explain what I mean:

Silva comes from a muay thai background and trained most of his career to fight in rings, and there are certain movement patterns that fighters use to escape off of the ropes that don’t apply in the Octagon. The shape of the cage makes the geometry a little bit trickier and requires opponents to move a little bit closer to the cage, as more of a back-away and sideways motion, instead of the more traditional circling motion that boxers and thai fighters use to get off of the ropes. Wanderlei was, and still seems to be, attached to attacking fighters with that movement pattern.

The “off-the-ropes” movement pattern is one of the things that has made alot of boxing movement styles translate poorly to MMA, and has caused a lot of issues for strikers just in general. That’s not to say that strikers can’t succeed in MMA, but it seems to be a major player in why so many traditional K-1 strikers have struggled to effectively use their striking in the cage, and some guys who would have gotten killed in K-1 have been such effective strikers in the UFC. Guys like Mirko “CroCop” Filipovic and Semmy Schilt, who spent their entire careers fighting in rings, have trouble finishing opponents they should kill easily. Even though CroCop and Schilt won their UFC debuts, defeating Eddie Sanchez and Pete Williams (respectively), many considered their performances unimpressive, and as I watch their fights, I find that they had a really hard time tracking their opponents when they had backed them into a corner.

The geometry of the cage requires fighters to train to fight an opponent moving off the cage and not off of the ropes, because it requires them to be used to that different movement pattern. There is another serious problem presented for the muay thai striker who uses the thai clinch as an effective attack against the corners of the ring as Wanderlei did often in Pride.

The fact is, the corners of a ring are a smaller angle, giving the opponent less room to escape by way of rolling off as the clinch is being put on or in the midst of the knees. When you make a larger angle, as the UFC has in the Octagon, you create more room for an opponent to move out, instead of making that movement more difficult by having the ropes closer together. Becomes more elbow room for opponents being attacked.

There is something to be said for the great muay thai fighters that have transitioned to the cage, Anderson
Silva, for one. The fact is, if you can still track your opponent and still understand the dynamics of the cage, you’re in good shape. It’s when you become used to the dimension of the ring that makes it hard to condition.

This may well go for other fighters, like the UFC guys who have failed to really transfer their game to the ring fighting style, where their opponents move differently off the ropes, and it may effect why grapplers seem less effected by the transition than strikers.

For me, this is a fairly recent idea, but the more I think about Wanderlei’s upcoming matchup with Jardine, the more I think that it will rest on his ability to adapt his style to where he can track Jardine, because his thai skills are far superior to Jardine and his jiu-jitsu blackbelt will, at least in my mind, make Jardine less eager to take this fight to the ground.

The UFC announcers and promoters talk about “Octagon shock” and how hard it is for a fighter to transition to the volatile environment that is the cage. While there’s some truth to dealing with the environmental difference of having chain links against your back instead of ropes, they tend to overplay the drama, especially when talking about experienced fighters. Guys like Wanderlei Silva and Mirko CroCop, who have been competing their entire career, are not going to be severely effected by a small change of venue, or a slight change of rules. There’s something more to that that plays into their games

I won’t excuse poor performances put on by Pride fighters since the buyout, but I will say that there is a technical reason for the struggle of so many great strikers. It’s just a thought, but it seems to explain alot of the failures of guys who should win, and it’s a new factor for all those betting on the Jardine vs. Silva match. A little food for thought going into the fight.