3 Neat Strikers You've Never Heard Of
We visit Russia, Cambodia, and Madagascar in search of lessons you won't learn at American Top Team.
While I enjoy just about any combat sport I can get my hands on, most of my time is spent watching MMA or Muay Thai, so those are the typical arts you’ll see me reference. But for the discerning martial artist, there’s endless value in studying a variety of arts, as slight differences in ruleset or culture can produce unique material for adapting to a more open ruleset. If you watch enough outside the combat sports orthodoxy, you’ll quickly find that a lot of techniques which at first appear ineffective actually work quite well when honed to proficiency, and that can often only happen under a ruleset whose specific constraints allow them to flourish.
So today I bring you three weird fighters from sports you probably don’t watch a lot of, but I’m certain you’ll find some value in their unique styles. We’ll look at a Russian karateka who uses his Karate skills to box up MMA fighters in the pocket, a top Kun Khmer fighter who relentlessly hunts his opponents’ rear legs, and a Malagasy Moraingy specialist who fills 30-second rounds with creative and unorthodox combinations.
Alexander Matmuratov: Karate Parries & Deflections
When we think of Karate fighters in MMA, the image that comes to mind is that of a fighter standing far away in a long, bladed stance. The driving principle behind that is the idea of Ikken Hissatsu, or to kill in one blow. Originally a figurative dictate to strike with commitment and make every blow count, the metric eventually became a target and its influence grew to shape competition format. The end result is the point Karate we’ve all become familiar with, where the fight is stopped and reset after a clean blow is landed.
A sport without exchanges doesn’t produce effective fighters on its own, but in ironic fashion, the primary design principle that held point Karate back as a complete striking art also turned out its most important import to the world of continuous fighting. Once point Karatekas started rounding out their skillsets, and MMA fighters of other backgrounds began incorporating point Karate drills and tools, it became clear that a specialty in avoiding all contact until the moment of impact is incredibly useful.
But as effective as the point Karate meta proved for distance management, it’s also homogenized their competitive contests. Most styles of Karate traditionally teach many stances, with a variety of purposes and foot positions, but the principle of one touch death incentivizes fighters to get as side-on as possible and disregard anything but their longest, straightest weapons. Instead, boxing has taken over as the main influence in pocket fighting, with even Karate-style fighters tending to abandon Karate’s unique inside weapons in favor of boxing techniques.
Alexander Matmuratov is a Russian Karate stylist who goes against that trend. While he’s integrated Karate techniques well into a broader skillset, he operates at length in the pocket and he does so with an unmistakably Karate flare. Matmuratov’s original art was Shotokan Karate, but he later diversified, training in Combat Sambo and ARB (Russian Military Hand-to-Hand), and winning championships in Koshiki Karate, a style of point Karate with continuous exchanges.
Matmuratov makes effective use of the old point Karate staples - he uses in-and-out bouncing footwork to set up entries and disengage, pairs a chambered round kick with side kicks and hook kicks, and knocks foes out with spinning kicks. But what’s most interesting about Matmuratov is where he diverges from the point Karate competition meta and borrows from the old textbooks.
He cycles through different positions within his stance, all more square than the standard point Karate fare. His typical stance sees his lead foot pointed directly forward, enabling quick kicks off either leg. But he’s ready to step diagonally into the opposite stance or draw his lead leg back square, where he can rapidly change directions and side step effortlessly.
Standing more square than a typical MMA stance allows Matmuratov to flow quickly into that squared up strafing stance, juking out opponents and circling away as they try to walk him down. He can also play with what weapons he’s showing, stepping into the opposite stance to open up a rear kick to the open side or close a shoulder to his chin as his opponent attacks. When he wants to spring forward, he’ll bounce into a wider, set stance and hide it in the motion of his footwork, often taking a split step to propel himself into a lunging rear hand.
You’ll often see fighters adopt a squared up stance as their back nears the cage, but much of the time it’s an involuntary result of running out of space, and few use it to its full capabilities. Matmuratov’s comfort in attacking from that sort of stance is fairly unique. With his feet level, long straight punches become more difficult without a front foot to transfer weight to, but both sides of his body end up about the same distance to the target. He can throw both hands with the same speed and power and without an exaggerated weight transfer, the blows are difficult to read.
Matmuratov often attacks in blitzes, walking his punches forward with square hips and shoulders.
Stepping forward with his leg opposite the punching hand adds power to the punches even without boxing-style hip rotation. Since he’s walking forward rather than rushing blind, his attacks out of the blitz are responsive too. He’ll pump out a few soft punches to draw up a guard and send a hard hooking blow outside it or smash the body. He’ll also anticipate counters and look to send a knee or kick to the ribs underneath them. Matmuratov’s hands serve to block and disrupt the opponent when he isn’t punching, and he’ll change levels and dip out the side if he anticipates a return.
While Matmuratov does a good job mitigating the openings his squared up combinations leave, there’s still a lot of inherent risk to stepping through combinations involving multiple shifts. A key aspect to making it work is picking the right time to leave stance, where the opponent isn’t in a strong position to counter, especially as a shorter fighter who usually needs to close distance to reach his man. Matmuratov’s most consistent entry to his blitzing combinations is to change levels underneath a jab and enter to the body.
Getting underneath the jab gives Matmuratov a short window of relative safety where he can step in and follow the punch as it retracts. By the time they recover, he’s gotten off a few blows and crowded them, smothering their opportunity to counter. Part of the reason it’s such an effective counter is that it’s unexpected - a fighter who just dipped beneath your jab is typically looking for a big right hand or left hook upstairs, but rattling off a combination to the body while plowing forward isn’t anyone’s first guess, and it allows him to set up further surprise shots upstairs.
The square stance of Matmuratov enables him to get in underneath the jab and rattle off a few quick punches before the opponent can counter. If they retreat or throw up a guard, he can keep working with quick, short punches. While these punches lack the fight-ending power of a hook with full hip rotation, his forward momentum and shoulder rotation get some juice into them, and over time they’ll wear down on an opponent’s gas tank if not curtailed.
Matmuratov’s marching footwork also plays in perfectly with his front kicks. In MMA, front kicks are typically used as a long-range tool by fighters trying to hold ground or avoid exchanges, but they’re useful for closing distance too. During Matmuratov’s blitzes, if an opponent backs farther away to recover some space, he’ll flick the ball of his foot into their tummy rather than risk rushing onto a counter.
The front kick flows right out of his stepping punches, as if a punch falls short, he’s already stepping forward, positioning his rear leg on the open side for a powerful kick. He can link exchanges together by stepping through into a front kick as his man disengages, then planting his kicking foot down right in front of them and resuming his flurry. The front kicks also cover his own exits, as he’ll occasionally step back to a level stance and intercept his opponent with the kick as they follow.
But the most interesting aspect of Matmuratov’s skillset to me is his defense. He’s a difficult man to score clean kicks on - not only does his square stance allow him to quickly pick up a leg and point his knee outwards to check, but he has a deep bag of crafty counters to punish kicks. He’s proficient in the Karate-style cross catch, the mechanics of which we’ve gone over previously.
It’s against spinning kicks where Matmuratov’s cleverness really shines, however, as he consistently hits one of the coolest counters I’ve seen in combat sports. When faced with a spinning back kick, Matmuratov simply powerbombs his opponent on their head.
When he sees the spin coming, he dashes outside the kick, drawing his rear foot and shoulder forward to crowd it and letting it fall onto his lowered arm in a scoop grip. He then grabs inside the shoulder to keep his opponent’s shoulders level and prevent them from bellying down. Finally, his far leg bumps their planting leg out at the thigh and he tosses them straight at the mat. Bumping high on the leg is key to getting good elevation, just like in a well executed Thai-style sweep but instead of pushing them over an invisible table, he’s chucking them at the ground like Kevin Nash.
There’s a lot of neat little tricks in Matmuratov’s game, but his unorthodox defense in the pocket is by far the coolest. The big problem with using a Karate style attack on the inside is that it is, by design, a very upright style. They tend to punch with a straight back and momentum that goes in a straight line, without the innovations made by boxing in rotational weight transfers and hip fold that naturally take the head away from return fire.
Without smooth hips folds, a fighter needs to be skilled in anticipating the openings he’s leaving and covering them with his arms if he’s to operate at length on the inside. But a high guard is tricky here too, since it doesn’t mesh well with the chain punching sequences, and leaves a lot of gaps for small gloves to sneak through. Instead, Matmuratov has found a way to incorporate traditional Karate deflections into his attack, covering the exposed parts of his head with forearm or shoulder, or even just swatting his opponent’s blows out of the air.
Matmuratov’s square stance leaves his shoulders relatively level, which means there’s some daylight for strikes on both sides of his face. But as the shoulder rotates into a straight punch, the punching shoulder briefly covers the chin. Matmuratov is conscious of this and will pattern his punches in a way that covers openings. When I say he defends punches with his own punches, it sounds like the sort of nonsense Koji Oishi infamously employed against Nick Diaz when trying to boop his punches straight out of the air, but Matmuratov does it in a much more sensible way, throwing away punches just to get shoulder or forearm in front of an oncoming attack.
Matmuratov will often end combinations or start engagements with an awkward swivel jab, or a corkscrew hook with his shoulder internally rotated. Whether the punch lands or not is immaterial, as the purpose is to get his shoulder in front of his chin, covering against an orthodox rear hand or southpaw lead hook, and with his minimal rotational weight transfer, he can answer with several blows in the time it takes his opponent to recover from their more committed weight transfer.