Technical prowess takes over the fight when athletic advantages begin to fail. With Rousey, and with so many forward moving swarmers, it is not always a case of needing to “stick-and-move”. For the early going “and-move” is enough. Making a fighter chase is often enough to slow them a little. If they don’t slow to reconsider their approach, they will quickly tire themselves out and both of those achieve the same goal of stopping the bum rush.

Holloway’s pair of fights against the great Jose Aldo showed the versatility of his jab. It is an educated jab which can be flicked out or hammered in, and is worked in doubles, can be used at multiple levels, and hides between feints. If Holloway can avoid Khabib for the first minute or two, the jab should be able to come into play more. Constant feinting is especially valuable when the opponent is constantly looking to duck inside to initiate a clinch or a shot whenever you punch. Khabib’s opponents often get into the panicked mindset where if he moves forward, they must punch to keep him off them—this actually makes his job easier as they plant their feet and open up their hips.

Everything in this fight points to activity and pace being Holloway’s ally. Holloway’s usual fighting weight is ten pounds lower, while Nurmagomedov is famed for his enormous weight cut—missing weight to fight Abel Trujillo and missing his UFC 209 date with Tony Ferguson due to a botched weight cut. That is not to say that Khabib is the kind of guy who will mentally collapse if the fight goes past the first round—even when he failed on every takedown attempt against Gleison Tibau, Nurmagomedov continued pursuing him until the dying seconds of the third round. However he did slow, and he got sloppier, and that is where Holloway’s superior technical striking can begin to pay dividends.

BJJ Scout put together a great study in anticipation of this fight this week, demonstrating Holloway’s handfighting when pressed against the cage. The single underhook position is an American Kickboxing Academy trademark, and stalling out the free hand before circling out with the collar tie has proven to be a great trick against the tactic. Fabricio Werdum demonstrated it against Cain Velasquez repeatedly. Scout’s study also shows how Max’s handfighting and wide base force opponents to pick up the single, whereupon Max will run out into the centre of the cage and limp leg out as Jose Aldo has always done so wonderfully.

A similar idea might be applied to the ground work. The fence has not proven to be the ally Nurmagomedov’s recent opponents once they are taken down. Working to wall walk up saw Michael Johnson and Edson Barboza both get stuck in two awful positions which Nurmagomedov shows off regularly. The first is catching the wrist or crook of the elbow across the back as the opponent posts his arm to begin standing up or dragging himself away from a Nurmagomedov smash pass. When he catches the arm across the back, Nurmagomedov will drag it in and smash his man down on top of it, essentially ending up in Mario Sperry’s old ‘One Armed Man’ position. In MMA this is bad news because the bottom man has lost his most effective block to strikes from that side.

Another position that Nurmagomedov gets to regularly is sitting on his opponent’s grapevined shins as they sit against the fence. For years this position was almost exclusively for wasting time or ‘laming it out’. Nurmagomedov discovered, however, that this is one of the few grounded positions where the uppercut is a practical punch.