Jean Silva: Southpaw Killer
After stopping five southpaws in a row, it's time to examine what makes Jean Silva so effective against them.
Jean Silva is the UFC’s newest star at Featherweight and so far he’s appeared the total package. He’s active, amassing five wins in a little over a year with the promotion. He’s exciting, finishing every one of those wins and peppering his fights with flashy, high-octane moments. And he has the personality and theatrical flair to avoid falling through the UFC’s ever-widening matchmaking cracks.
Silva’s personality isn’t just an act for the microphones either. Jean Silva is constantly amusing himself in his fights, as he points at his opponents, gestures around like a maniac, or plays the “made you look” game. But anyone fooled by the silliness is in for a rough time, as the antics sit atop a bedrock of ferocious killer instinct and a carefully constructed approach to fighting.
Stylistically, Silva takes a lot of familiar elements and blends them together into a fairly unique game. The deep influence of traditional martial arts like Karate and Tai Kwon Do on MMA can be seen in his approach to distancing, as he likes to fight outside jabbing range and goad opponents into walking onto intercepting counters. But his first martial art was Muay Thai, and it shows in his ancillary tools as he makes crafty use of elbows and knees, making him much more potent on the inside than the typical fighter of his mold.
The most peculiar part of Silva’s UFC run is that he’s fought nothing but southpaws thus far - five of them in a row. It’s proven a happy coincidence for him however, as the primary weapon in Silva’s arsenal is a cracking left hook. His comfort at long range and punishing counter hook make him a stylistic nightmare for southpaws used to controlling an orthodox opponent’s lead hand and coming in straight.
The Distance Trap
When Lyoto Machida first pioneered the art of standing far away, it was a revolutionary fusion of Karate and MMA, the likes of which we’d never seen before. By now the tactics Machida used to frustrate opponents and convince them to rush onto his intercepting counters have percolated down so thoroughly that they’re regularly employed by fighters who aren’t otherwise Karate-coded at all.
Jean Silva is one such fighter who likes to set up an extra step away from his opponents, outside their immediate jabbing range. Fighters used to gathering information with their jab tend to struggle with this distance, as their primary range-finding tool is removed and they’re forced to guess at the distance or figure out a new way to close distance. If the opponent proceeds as usual, they need to take two steps to reach Silva, and the first step tips him off to counter on the second.
One of the trickier aspects of fighting as far back as Silva does is that there needs to be a reason for opponents to close the distance. Often fighters who look to stay all the way outside and draw opponents onto them skew tall and long for their divisions, as they can hit from further out and skip back when a return salvo is launched, forcing engagements on their terms as they rack up safe points from outside. An alternative is to get really good at kicking and not getting kicked.
Silva doesn’t have the size or length to safely needle shorter fighters with jabs, but his slick, efficient kicking game allows him to command the fight on the outside and force opponents to close distance, where he’s waiting with coiled power. His time in Muay Thai gave him smooth, mechanically sharp kicks that he can fire without a labored weight transfer to tip it off. He mixes up his kicks to the body and head, and has even shown an unusual fearlessness in kicking fighters looking to take him down.
Silva looks to punch off his kicks often, launching a right hand as his kicking leg touches back down. Kicking tactics in MMA have lagged well behind boxing tactics as the striking talent has grown, and it’s still rare to see MMA fighters put their punches and kicks together fluidly. Punching as the kicking leg retracts is a common tactic in kicking sports, as it punishes some of the more reliable counters to body kicks. Since MMA fighters tend to stand a good deal farther apart than in other continuous striking sports, punching off his kicks also gives Silva a method of closing into his punches without exposing himself to counters.
Silva’s Muay Thai experience left him with sound defensive responses to kicks that make it even more difficult for opponents to compete with him on the outside. Often you’ll see highlights of fighters with Muay Thai experience (like Rafael Fiziev) slipping head kicks by leaning back at the waist, and the reason this is a common tactic in Muay Thai is that kicks to the arms score, so there’s an incentive to make high kicks miss entirely instead of blocking with the arms.
He’s proven very difficult to hit clean with kicks. In body kick battles, his mechanics and speed give him an edge, and he can reliably read and sway back from head kicks. His wide stance accentuates this, keeping his rear foot farther away than his head appears and giving him lots of room to pull it back out of range. Most fighters trying to kick with Silva offer only naked kicks, unable to build off their threat to exploit his defensive reaction, so he’s able to score comfortably on the outside and goad them onto his counters.
Open Stance Hand-Fighting
The way Silva handles the hand-fighting in open stance engagements also makes him an unusual opponent for southpaw strikers and a tricky fighter to close distance on. The bread and butter of many southpaws is controlling the opponent’s lead hand to land their rear down the pipe. The lead hand control cuts off the orthodox fighter’s jab and keeps the southpaw safe as he steps in to land his left. With the lead hand controlled, all his attention can be devoted to his opponent’s rear hand as he feints and sets traps to land his own, allowing him to draw out and punish it.
Of course, these tactics are open to both fighters, but southpaws bank far more practice hours in these sorts of engagements and tend to build their approach around them, while orthodox fighters find themselves there far more rarely and may not even have high level southpaw training partners. Watch any Conor McGregor fight and you’ll see this in action as his shorter opponent reaches out to meet his extended hand, feeding McGregor access to hand control and giving him valuable distancing information at a range where they can’t yet touch him.
Silva doesn’t fall into the trap of playing patty cake with fighters who are longer and more experienced at it. Against southpaws, he’ll go for the occasional hand trap and rear straight, but for the most part he’s content to let his opponent lead the hand-fighting while keeping his lead hand tight. His opponents often grow tentative, reaching out for a hand that isn’t there, or watching him take a short step back once they touch it, knowing he wants them to step forward again and commit.
Controlling a fighter’s lead hand is a good way to seize initiative - you don’t need to time your attacks as precisely if you can secure an advantage before engaging. But Silva would rather compete on pure timing and bet that he can time his entries and counters better than his opponents, keeping his lead hand tight and coiled to strike. By denying the handfight, he can often get his southpaw opponents stepping into him blind and make them pay.
Silva’s patient approach played a big role in his knockout of Melsik Baghdasaryan. Very little happened in the roughly four minute fight, but as Baghdasaryan failed to find entries on Silva, continually reaching out to control Silva’s lead hand only for Silva to pull it back tighter or step back, he grew more willing to step in and open himself up to counters. As soon as Baghdasaryan was willing to step in and attack without the safety of hand control to cover his entry, Silva was waiting to smack him with a counter hook. Only a minute later, Silva landed another lead hook, circling his hand around distractedly while inching closer, drawing Baghdasaryan into reaching out to cover a hand that was already hooking around his outstretched arm, setting up a right hand that felled him.
When Silva leads, he often does it by setting traps with his footwork or entering off-rhythm instead of through touching the lead hand. By pulling away from the hand-fight, he denies southpaw opponents their familiar tactile sense of distance and ability to anticipate through touch, and changes how the entries occur to terms they’re typically less comfortable with.
This Left Hook Kills Southpaws
When orthodox strikers fight a southpaw, they often get lured into the distance game, neutralizing their lead hand and fencing with their rear. The collision of the orthodox and southpaw’s lead legs naturally forces a longer default distance, which can prove awkward to fighters not experienced with that dynamic.
But for the savvy orthodox striker who can avoid getting locked into the rear hand battle, the left hook offers some distinct advantages against a southpaw.