Georges St-Pierre picked Alexander Volkanovski to keep the featherweight title at UFC 333, then spent much of the same interview explaining how Volkanovski could lose it. That’s the most honest prediction anyone will give you this week, and it matches how I see Saturday’s main event at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi.
St-Pierre spoke with Covers, and MMA Weekly published his comments ahead of the card. His scouting report on the challenger was short. He described Evloev as very strong, a fighter who puts a lot of pressure on you and who is very hard to get away from once he gets a hold of you. Read that the way a wrestling coach would. He lists three traits there (strength, pressure and grip retention), and the last one is what wins fights.
The part of wrestling people don’t watch
Plenty of fighters can complete a takedown. The suffocating ones are defined by what happens after the first attempt stalls. They switch to a body lock when the single leg gets sprawled on. They stay attached when the opponent stands up off the fence. They make every second on the feet feel borrowed. When St-Pierre, one of the best wrestle-strikers the sport has produced, singles out how hard Evloev is to shake loose, he’s pointing at the exact skill that casual viewers dismiss with lay and pray complaints. Holding a grip on a world-class athlete who is trying to escape is work, and it drains the man underneath far more than it drains the man on top.
Evloev comes in undefeated, the top contender at 145 pounds, and he’s 32. That last number matters as much as anything he does technically.
Six years is a long time at featherweight
Volkanovski is 38. St-Pierre didn’t dodge it, and I respect him for that. He said that age usually makes a fighter more experienced and smarter, but that athletic ability starts to slip a little, and that things a fighter used to see coming can start to surprise him.
Translate that idea of no longer seeing things coming into a wrestling matchup and you get the level change. Defending a takedown starts before the shot, with reading the shoulders drop and the hips lower, and it ends with a sprawl or a whizzer that has to land inside a very small window. Lose a fraction of a second in that window and the shot you used to stuff becomes a scramble. Lose a fraction in the scramble and the scramble becomes a body lock against the cage. Against most featherweights, a slightly slower read is survivable. Against a man St-Pierre describes as nearly impossible to shake once he’s attached, each late reaction turns into a minute of carrying weight.
St-Pierre went further than most analysts would on the record. He suggested that at 38 a fighter can be at the limit, and he openly asked whether the best version of Volkanovski is already behind him, admitting he doesn’t know and that Saturday will answer it.
The champion’s case
None of this means Volkanovski is a sitting target. He’s making the second defense of his second featherweight reign, and MMA Weekly notes he’s widely considered the greatest featherweight in UFC history. St-Pierre’s description of him was the opposite of a warning. He called Volkanovski good everywhere, a complete fighter who is well-rounded and very smart.
Smart is the word I’d underline. A smart veteran against a pressure wrestler wins by choosing where the fight happens. He spends as little time on the fence as possible, he exits after exchanges instead of admiring them, and he gives the wrestler no reason to stay in the pocket long enough to set up entries. He doesn’t need to win every grappling exchange. He needs to make sure there are fewer of them than Evloev wants.
That’s why St-Pierre’s pick comes with a condition attached. “I think if Volkanovski shows up the best of his ability, on top of his game, I think he can do it,” he said.
My pick
That one conditional word is carrying the whole fight. St-Pierre is betting on a version of Volkanovski that the champion has to prove still exists, and he openly admits he doesn’t know whether it does.
I’m taking Evloev by decision. In a five-round title fight, the bill for defending grips comes due late, and it comes due faster at 38 than at 32. Volkanovski’s skill set gives him a clear path in the first two rounds. Rounds 3 through 5 are where a six-year age gap turns into a second-and-a-half-late sprawl, and where an undefeated grappler who won’t let go starts banking minutes. If this reaches the scorecards, I’d ask the judges to credit that control as the effort it is and to keep their 10-8s in the drawer unless someone actually gets hurt.
Watch the center of the cage at the start of Round 4. If Volkanovski is standing there free with his hands up, St-Pierre looks like a prophet. If Evloev’s hands have been locked around his waist for half of Round 3, St-Pierre was being polite.
