Although Georges St-Pierre walked away from UFC 167 wearing gold, there aren’t a lot of people in the MMA world who agree that he should be UFC champion.
Johny Hendricks landed a slew of powerful punches and badly damaged St-Pierre’s face in Saturday’s headliner. Looking at the FightMetric stats, St-Pierre actually landed more significant strikes, but Hendricks landed more total strikes.
Both men connected on half of their takedowns attempted, but St-Pierre narrowly took the edge with one more takedown than Hendricks. GSP also added two submission attempts.
Obviously, the fight was pretty close, but how did the champ manage to edge Hendricks on the scorecards?
St-Pierre attempted to get his striking arsenal going by using the jab early on. It’s a weapon that’s served him well in the past, with the win over Josh Koscheck at UFC 124 being GSP‘s best showcase of his jab.
St-Pierre used the punch to halt Hendricks’ offense at times but also used it to negate one of Hendricks’ biggest advantages—his ability to cover space. Coming into the fight, the knock on Hendricks was that he wasn’t technically sound but could cover a wide amount of space with his powerful punches.
As effective as the jab had been for St-Pierre in the past, it simply wasn’t on par with his past performances at UFC 167. Instead St-Pierre had to rely on another attribute that’s improved tenfold since GSP began his UFC career, his footwork.
If you read any article by Jack Slack, you’ll notice one of his common themes is proper footwork. It’s a skill that can often cover up a fighter’s deficiencies or highlight his or her strengths. For St-Pierre, it’s more of the latter, as his footwork allowed St-Pierre to avoid falling victim to the sledgehammer of a left hand from Hendricks.
True, Hendricks was able to land his power shots and some nice ground-and-pound, but he wasn’t able to string together multiple shots. Hendricks may have been able to do more than just rock St-Pierre if he were able to land consecutive power shots, but St-Pierre did well to avoid finding himself in that predicament.
A final area that helped St-Pierre was his ability to finish the fight with an exclamation point. The fight was tight going into the fifth round and St-Pierre took advantage of Hendricks coasting a bit in the final frame.
The fight was razor close, and I believe if St-Pierre doesn’t step away from the sport, we will get to see GSP-Hendricks II and put all these questions of who’s better to rest once and for all.
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