If you were asked to come up with an overarching theme for the weekend’s MMA action, you might very well pick “disappointment.” Cain Velasquez at last returned to the cage, promising to be healthy and ready to pursue the heavyweight title he once held, then had his knee explode in under thirty seconds. Supposed kickboxers Michael ‘Venom’ Page and Paul Daley met in a grudge match then did almost no striking and instead wrestled for twenty five rancid minutes. Matt Mitrione and Sergei Kharitonov managed a No Contest in under thirty seconds of fighting. Even Paul Felder versus James Vick turned into more of a throw-shit-at-the-wall slog than a razor sharp striking match.

But one theme that stuck out was that of movement issues. Some fighters were confounded by a mobile target, while others struggled because of the flaws in their own basic locomotion, and there was an interesting contrast between the backward movement of James Vick and of Michael Page. This last example will, of course allow us to rope in a Conor McGregor example to up the view count on this slow weekend. But before we get into that let us touch on one of the weekend’s most frustrating fights: Vitaly Minakov versus Cheick Kongo.

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If you know Cheick Kongo you probably expected a bit of a grind on Saturday night but Kongo actually provided the sizzle in this fight while Minakov looked dull and uninspired. The one-time “next Fedor” got boxed up by a forty three year old Cheick Kongo and he looked absolutely clueless throughout. More than anything it was Minakov’s insistence on leading with the right hand each time he tried to engage that saw him on the wrong end of a striking lesson.

The right hand lead is flashy and less common, not because it is a bad way to initiate an attack but because it carries such significant disadvantages over the jab that the jab is almost always the better option. The right straight involves a turn of the shoulders and hips to square before throwing and comes from further away. The jab involves little shoulder or hip involvement before the strike is already obscuring the opponent’s vision, and the striking surface is already closer to the target. And bear in mind that all of that is if you are throwing a straight right lead with good form. Minakov was simply stepping out in front of his stance, throwing all of his weight onto his lead foot, and swinging overarm.