So let’s be honest with ourselves: Frank Mir vs. Andrei Arlovski was one of the truly disappointing fights of this year. While not everyone agreed with my prediction that Arlovski could stick and move Mir to death most fans figured that with a slow, hittable fighter on one side and a glass cannon on the other the fight couldn’t be anything other than a barn burner.
Oh how wrong we were.
For all their career resurgence talk, Mir and Arlovski looked every inch like two heavy men almost a decade past their prime forms. There was blood, some clean shots, and a moment of tension when Mir actually grounded Arlovski only for the experienced Belarusian to fight back to the feet. But mostly there was ineffectual clinch work and inactivity in the open canvas.
My new friend Brad rightfully indicated that we should be thankful the fight was drowned out by the audio from the Southern Mississippi game.
But if there’s one thing we should take away from this fight, it’s the importance of head movement.
In my pessimistic analysis of the match up, I pointed out that when in the southpaw stance Mir’s dipping left hook would allow him to slip Arlovski’s right hand completely and hopefully counter over the top for a knockout. While Arlovski, being the far superior athlete, either darted too close or too far after his right hand to eat a counter it was clear Mir’s strategy of slipping the first punch was paying off.
Arlovski missed almost every right hand lead he threw.
I use that example because even in the first round when Arlovski was fresh, he couldn’t land cleanly. Frank Mir is no defensive specialist; most of the savvier strikers he has faced have managed to find his chin with alarming consistency. Yet Arlovski found himself swinging at air against one of the easier to hit fighters in the company. Every time Arlovski threw the right, Mir would slip to one side or the other and take almost no damage.
While I’ve only hesitantly called Arlovski a “one handed” puncher before, the fact is that the overwhelming amount of his offense comes from his right hand. Unlike Fabricio Werdum or Junior Dos Santos, Arlovski never had the type of jab that could stop his opponents. One of the chief reasons for his string of knockout losses is that fellow heavyweights could simply walk through the jab and begin testing his glass jaw. Combine that with the mediocrity of his left hook, and it’s not hard to see why he went back to choosing his right hand for any given situation.
But Frank Mir did something that Travis Browne didn’t: He made Arlovski lead.
Here’s the thing; leading is dangerous. Unless you are very fast or savvy, the fighter on the receiving end of the lead always has more information than the fighter throwing it and can make the more educated strike. Hell some of the greatest knockout artists in combat sport history like Anderson Silva, Mark Hunt and Roberto Duran did their best work by baiting a shot out of an opponent and then countering it.
So Arlovski had to approach Mir, and with his half-hearted leg kicks being frequently checked he had only his right hand to cover distance. Uppercuts are ineffectual at range unless thrown mid combo and any coach can tell you that long, rear hand hooks have serious drawbacks. That left him with his straight punch.
But straight punches can be slipped fairly easily if you know they’re coming and Mir realized (perhaps in his training camp itself) that it was the only punch Arlovski could throw at a distance. His lack of athleticism and truly amateur clinch game lost him the decision and I would have preferred he threw a straight left off his dip rather than a hook but he put together a game plan that made a top 5 heavyweight look like a chump.
The interesting (and sad) thing is that it won’t matter in the title fight.
Neither Fabricio Werdum nor Cain Velasquez is effective at pre-emptive head movement and both love to lead. The same jab that popped Cain’s head back like a Pez dispenser as he closed distance will be a lightning quick right hand and Werdum, for all his savviness and toughness, is arguably even more hittable than the man he took the title from.
But for amateur fighters or new fans, I want to emphasize the same thing about this fight that I did about Fabricio Werdum vs. Cain Velasquez: a good game plan beats athleticism every time.
