UFC featherweight champion Conor McGregor takes on UFC lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 on Saturday in the first matchup of reigning titleholders since BJ Penn and Georges St-Pierre clashed at UFC 94 back in 2009.
This is a fight of epic proportions. Not only is it a matchup of two reigning champions, but McGregor is by far the biggest draw in the history of the sport and one of its two biggest stars, and he faces Alvarez on the biggest possible stage at Madison Square Garden in the UFC’s first trip to New York in the modern era. This card will probably be the highest-selling event in UFC history.
With all of that history and context in mind, it’s easy to forget what a great pure fight this is.
Don’t listen to those who try to denigrate his accomplishments: McGregor is on one of the epic runs in the sport’s history right now, winning eight of his nine fights in the UFC, six of them by devastating knockout.
He finished Jose Aldo, the best featherweight in MMA history and an all-time great who hadn’t lost in a decade, in 13 seconds with the first punch he threw. He avenged his loss to Nate Diaz, albeit with some controversy. He finished Dustin Poirier and Chad Mendes and took a one-sided decision from Max Holloway, who has since won nine in a row and shown he’s one of the best 145-pounders in the world.
That’s a resume any fighter could be proud of.
Alvarez is no slouch either. The longtime Bellator lightweight champion entered the UFC with a ton of momentum, having compiled an incredible resume over his decade in the sport and avenged his only recent loss to Michael Chandler. He fell to Donald Cerrone in his UFC debut, though, and eked out a pair of close split decisions over Gilbert Melendez and Anthony Pettis.
When Alvarez received a title shot against the dominant Rafael Dos Anjos, it was more a matter of timing and career achievements than what he had done recently. Still, Alvarez made the most of it, blasting the Brazilian with a brutal right hand in the first round to set up the finishing flurry.
With the UFC title under his belt, Alvarez is one of the most accomplished lightweights in the history of the sport. Now he’ll get a stage that befits the scale of his achievements in his largely under-the-radar career.
What a fight. Let’s dig into the matchup.
Conor McGregor
Record: 20-3 (17 KO, 1 SUB, 2 DEC)
Height: 5’9″
Reach: 74″
McGregor is an aggressive, dangerous puncher with a great deal of craft and depth to his game. The southpaw’s left hand is the centerpiece of his approach, and he has a variety of ways of placing it on his opponent’s chin.
Pressure is McGregor’s default mode. He does his best work while moving forward and pressing his opponent back toward the fence with a combination of kicks and footwork. Side, front and oblique kicks push his opponent straight back, while spinning kicks attack the space into which his opponent would try to escape to McGregor’s right side. If his opponent tries to escape to his left side, the left hand or a left kick is waiting for him.
When the opponent hits the fence, McGregor really goes to work. He excels at sticking his opponent on the end of his long reach, staying just out of range and then firing off a single left hand at a time. If the opponent is really hurt, McGregor has shown an increasing propensity for devastating head-body flurries of punches.
When the opponent tries to circle out along the fence away from the left hand, McGregor lets him escape to that side and pivots slightly as he throws a straight left that catches the opponent across the plane of his body.
That inside-angle left hand, as it’s known, is McGregor’s bread and butter and his most devastating punch. In a normal orthodox-southpaw matchup, both fighters try to get their lead foot to the outside of the opponent’s to gain the outside angle. This shortens the path for the rear power hand and provides a dominant angle.
McGregor doesn’t play that game. Instead, he’s happy to let his opponent overcommit to the outside angle, because it creates an opening for the inside angle he likes. It’s a powerful shot because it arrives across the plane of the opponent’s body so his legs can’t bend to absorb its force.
McGregor is especially fond of that inside-angle left hand as a counter, like the one he used to knock out Aldo. It’s just one possibility in the increasingly deep bag of counters he has at his disposal. Especially in the second fight against Diaz, McGregor showed off an array of responses, including same-time counters as Diaz threw, pull counters that drew Diaz forward and half-beat counters just after Diaz let go.
Improved counters are just one piece of McGregor’s continued evolution. He was effectively a one-handed fighter for much of his career, but in recent fights he has shown a jab and especially a right hook to follow his devastating left hand.
That’s the good piece of McGregor’s game, but he’s hardly flawless. The biggest problem is defense. He moves his head in the pocket, but that’s mostly to set up his counters, and otherwise he relies almost entirely on his chin or not being there to be hit. Considering the pace at which he likes to fight, that means the Irishman is going to eat a lot of damage.
Pace is the other issue. McGregor likes to put a great deal of volume on his opponent, burying him in a steady stream of left hands and left kicks. Both Diaz fights showed the limit of his gas tank. If he’s completely in control, McGregor will look fresh even after throwing a tremendous number of strikes. If he’s being pressured, however, that tank can run dry much more quickly than we might expect.
Striking is McGregor’s wheelhouse, but he’s not a one-dimensional fighter. He has a nice selection of well-timed shot takedowns and a series of throws in the clinch, though he doesn’t use them often. On top, he’s a violent ground-striker and a smooth guard-passer who controls with real acumen. It’s not a major component of his game, but he could probably stand to fall back on these excellent tools a little more often.
Defensively, however, McGregor has some problems. He’s not a bad defensive wrestler, but he’s also not bulletproof, especially against opponents who can chain takedowns together. It’s not easy to hold him down, either, but especially in the middle of the cage (where he can’t use the fence) he doesn’t offer much from his back.
The real issue is in scrambles. Going back to his early career, McGregor has a bad habit of panicking in transitions and trying to muscle his way out of trouble—that’s how Diaz got to his back for the choke, how Joe Duffy found an early arm triangle six years ago and how Artemij Sitenkov caught him with a kneebar in 2008. There’s a clear pattern here, and it’s one he has never truly fixed.
Eddie Alvarez
Record: 28-4 (15 KO, 7 SUB, 6 DEC)
Height: 5’9″
Reach: 69″
Intelligence, experience and adaptability define Alvarez’s game. A 13-year pro and a veteran of 32 fights, there’s nothing he hasn’t seen inside a ring or cage on three continents. Finally a UFC champion at the age of 32, Alvarez puts all of his accumulated knowledge to use in a crafty, smart approach to fighting.
While he’s a step slower than he was in his mid- or late 20s, Alvarez is still quick and blessed with outstanding hand speed. A powerful puncher, Alvarez does his best work on the feet and utilizes a variety of different strategies depending on who’s standing in front of him. He can both pressure his opponent toward the fence and play a more stationary game focused on exchanges in the middle of the cage.
At his best, however, Alvarez sticks and moves through the space of the cage before picking his spots to sit down on counters or dart into range with a combination. The champion has outstanding footwork and a great sense for how to use the space of the cage to his advantage. His pivots and sidesteps are tricky and confusing, allowing him to find clean angles for his counters and blitzing combinations.
When he goes on the attack, Alvarez does a great job of moving his shots between the head and the body. He has a particular preference for going from a straight right to the body to a left hook upstairs or finishing with a liver shot, and a doubled right hand as he steps in on an angle is a specialty. The occasional kick adds some variety, and he loves to attack the legs and body.
While Alvarez does good work with these in-and-out combinations, he’s even better when he can draw his opponent onto his counters.
He has quick triggers and a great sense for how to move his shots around and through his opponent’s guard. Against Dos Anjos, for example, Alvarez landed several straight-right counters and then followed with a right-hook counter that staggered the champion, who was expecting another straight.
Alvarez’s layered defense makes these counters possible. He moves his head, parries and blocks shots as they come in, all of which provide him with different opportunities to land his shots. He’s not the best defensive fighter in terms of avoiding shots, but he’s one of the best at turning his defense into offense.
That leads to one of the major issues with Alvarez’s game: his tendency to eat really hard shots. Though he has been finished via strikes only once, the champion has been staggered or knocked down on many occasions, and his desire to hang in the pocket to counter makes him vulnerable to these kinds of shots.
Volume isn’t Alvarez’s strong suit either. When his opponent lets him set the pace, he works in a measured fashion and only lets go serious offensive output when his opponent tries to get in his face, as Dos Anjos did. In a pure range-striking matchup, he can be drowned in volume.
While he likes to strike, wrestling is a strong secondary skill set for Alvarez. He covers his level changes with punches well in open space, though he can be too predictable with his entries against the cage. Once he’s in on his opponent’s hips, Alvarez is relentless, switching from singles to doubles and everything in between while pounding away with short punches in transition.
The fence is Alvarez’s best friend in these kinds of exchanges, and he excels at grinding his opponent for minutes at a time with head pressure and good technique in the clinch and with takedown chains. It’s not pretty, but it’s tiring, and Alvarez has gas to spare.
Alvarez is a competent top-position grappler. He has real power in his shots when he can posture up, and he passes well, especially to the back. It would be an exaggeration to call him a submission threat, though, at least against high-level competition.
Betting Odds
McGregor -155, Alvarez +135, per Odds Shark
Prediction
This is going to be a great fight.
It’s clear what McGregor will try to do: pressure Alvarez toward the fence, lace him with left hands and create openings to land a big counter when Alvarez tries to fight off the cage. That’s typically what McGregor tries to do in every fight, though the pressure can be more or less measured, and he might place more or less emphasis on the counters as opposed to leading the dance.
Alvarez, however, has a couple of different options here. He might try to pressure McGregor right back, adopting the kind of wrestling- and clinch-heavy game plan against the fence that he used to stifle Melendez and Pettis. Alternatively, he can try the same strategy he used against Dos Anjos, another southpaw pressure fighter, and play a stick-and-move game with a lot of emphasis on landing counters.
They’re not mutually exclusive: Alvarez might pressure in bursts or try to hit reactive takedowns while he’s avoiding McGregor’s pressure. The question is how much of each Alvarez adopts.
Both approaches have things to recommend them. McGregor is a lethal striker, but his takedown defense isn’t perfect, and Alvarez might be able to wear him down with a dose of grinding. On the other hand, McGregor is also hittable, and Alvarez can use his slick counterpunching game to make the Irishman pay for his aggression.
Both approaches also have downsides, though. A pressuring Alvarez is a less defensively sound Alvarez, as we saw against Pettis, and he risks walking into McGregor’s devastating counters when he tries to get into range to shoot takedowns. A sticking-and-moving Alvarez is harder to hit, but he risks becoming stuck on the end of McGregor’s left hand and getting outworked.
It’s plausible for Alvarez to make either, both or a mixture work long enough to finish McGregor or win the rounds for a decision victory.
The problem is McGregor’s power and craft. He’s going to hit Alvarez, and the question is whether the lightweight champion can handle it. Alvarez has always been prone to eating big shots and getting dropped, and McGregor is one of the most dangerous punchers in the sport.
The pick is McGregor by knockout in the second round.
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