Raphael Assunção, The Greatkeeper
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
MMA does not have a long tradition of elder-statesmen.
In a sport where athleticism is at a premium, this isn’t much of a surprise on its face; it’s an endeavor of extraordinarily thin margins, margins that even fighters at athletic parity struggle to navigate against one another. One of the aspects that separates MMA from a sport like boxing, however, is the sport being too young for many fighters to develop a system that can deal at all with the athletic disparity that comes with age; at least at this stage, the winner of an MMA fight is decided by who does more and who tries harder, as the path to control an opponent’s initiative is generally seen as just initiating more than they do. As such, the trappings of age become nearly insurmountable for those used to fighting that way; even for the most polished fighter who is built on volume and just outwilling their opponent, their career as an elite fighter ends as soon as their conditioning or their volume starts to slip. When the game being played is a race, a broken-down car won’t win.
In a sense, then, it can be reasonably predicted which fighters would have some staying power when their athleticism isn’t necessarily all there, and those are the few whose skillsets are constructed more around limiting their opponent (rather than matching them step-for-step); in other words, the ones that don’t treat a fight as a straightforward race of volume, but spend more time placing barriers in the other lanes. Fighters tend to be confident in their ability to win a fight where both men are “taking turns” offensively, at least when they’re in their athletic prime and volume is how they win fights anyway; however, deeper into a career, it takes a willingness to be conservative and an ability to do so safely.
Looking at the fighters who have remained strong despite age or a long career, the model holds. Francisco Trinaldo, for instance, has remained a relevant lightweight who should be on a four-win streak and in the top-15 at the time of writing, and he’s 41; Trinaldo’s success is not built on action and volume, but on craft in keeping his opponent from getting offense for free. Jussier Formiga is a 35-year-old flyweight with a win over the #1 man in the division; he keeps a fairly low workrate on the feet, focusing on staying safe, but keeps his opponent to a lower one by feinting them into palpitations and running them into takedowns. Yoel Romero’s burst-offense/counterpunching approach has kept him viable even against fighters with games built on initiative to the nth degree (someone like Paulo Costa), and even the great Jose Aldo tackled this problem for a short time at the top of 145 after his decline became evident.
Very few fighters, however, have kept that success as consistent as Recife’s Raphael Assunção has, against a field of opponents as monstrous as any in MMA today. Assunção’s consistency isn’t built to catch eyes, and he’s grown to be the ultimate thorn in the side of a company that respects nothing less than a quiet company man; however, Assunção has steadfastly remained in the top 5, derailing the men that the UFC wanted him to falter against, and carving out a resume that rivals that of many true greats of the industry.
The Hopefuls
The best place to start with Assunção might be one of the few times he wasn’t facing a top-opponent; after a tough outing at UFC 212, Assunção faced another one of the winners at that event in American wrestler Matthew Lopez (who had beaten up Johnny Eduardo). The UFC apparently wanted Lopez to take out a second old Brazilian, but the oddsmakers knew better, as Assunção closed a massive favorite; the fight showed why, as Lopez looked like little more than a blank slate upon which the Brazilian could work his magic.
Assunção’s reputation as being primarily a counterpuncher is well-earned. Facing another southpaw in Lopez opened his rear-hand counter up to a great degree, but also allowed Assunção to show one of the more consistent aspects of his counterpunching (which will be revisited in his bouts against Dillashaw and Munhoz, to make up for the camera work in this fight): his mastery of the inside angle.
For a fighter looking to throw their rear-hand in an open-stance engagement, the conventional wisdom is to step outside the lead foot; this shortens the path of the blow, as it lines the rear hand up directly with his opponent’s centerline. However, this is less a principle and more an overblown suggestion, one that Assunção is very good at punishing.
Some of it is just anticipation; Assunção can see Lopez taking the angle and expects the straight, at which point the marginal transit-time edge doesn’t really matter as Assunção can slip inside the blow and look to cross over it. However, a specific answer to the situation is the inside-angle left hook; the outside-position lines up the rear-hand, but the inside-position shortens the lead-hand and takes it inside the lead-hand of his opponent. If Lopez showed his hand stepping onto the outside angle, Assunção’s tight left hook beat him to the punch.
The most damaging aspect of this fight, however, was Assunção’s kicking game; on the outside, much of Assunção’s approach is a sort of pecking activity to encourage his opponent to try to push him back, but against Lopez, Assunção’s kicks took on a different character. When the wrestler couldn’t be goaded into chasing Assunção, he just got eaten up from the outside with inside leg-kicks.
Assunção is also fairly underrated on the lead; he’s most comfortable on the counter, but he played havoc with Lopez’s expectations to open opportunities up. For example, here, Assunção feints into range before shooting out a quick straight, drawing the left hook from Lopez; in the second sequence, he again feints into range to draw the left hook, but stays in the pocket and ducks underneath to land a clean right-hand counter.
The followup shows both of the tactics mentioned earlier. Lopez tries to reassert himself with the outside-angle straight, only for the inside-angle left hook of Assunção to herd him into Assunção’s right. Assunção then kicks his leg again.
The finish was mostly perfunctory. Assunção takes advantage of Lopez being utterly cowed by the rest of the fight, entering off a flying knee and knocking him dead.
Truthfully, very few expected Lopez to pose a problem in this fight; it didn’t prove anything, it was a showcase. Assunção’s next one was a different matter, a very different matchup, against a prospect who was actually fairly interesting; Rob Font was off a knockout win over the solid Thomas Almeida, and his bid at the top-3 was a far more serious one. For a counterpuncher, a layered jab is often a very difficult thing to deal with, and that was Font’s calling card; however, by the end of the fight, Assunção left the Bostonian utterly befuddled.
Font’s success has always primarily been a function of how granularly he can apply his jab; his fight against Douglas Silva de Andrade was brilliant, for instance, because he had the power-puncher’s reactions to his jab sussed out very early. For the first part of their fight, though, Assunção just gave Font very liitle feedback upon which to build; Font was looking for overreactions, but he couldn’t find them in Assunção catching the jab in his hands and retreating.
When Assunção entered, it was usually behind his kicks, which didn’t give Font what he needed; Assunção measured distance with his longest weapon, and stayed outside Font’s comfortable jabbing range otherwise.
The strategy was tuned perfectly towards encouraging Font to cover distance more readily; Font couldn’t just jab in place with the range Assunção was keeping to kick, he couldn’t just take one step with his jab because Assunção was obstructing it and stepping back, so the logical conclusion was to take a couple steps forward and chase Assunção down as he retreated.
When Font reached this point in round 1, though, Assunção changed tack; Font was conditioned to expect Assunção to drop back each time he entered, only for Assunção to plant and counter during these preliminary motions as the first round continued. With his manipulation of the range, Assunção didn’t have the need to close down the taller man; he got Font to cover the distance towards him, and met him halfway.
Assunção is not a deep defensive fighter, as longer exchanges are not his game (which is something seen more in his fights against Dillashaw and Moraes); however, he is hard to hit, as his initial defensive-layer of distancing is tricky to overcome. Font’s issue was that his own jab was used against him; Assunção’s measured retreats and his obstruction of the jab took away Font’s primary gauge of distance, and as Font continued to try to jab in, it was Assunção who used it to ensure that Font was there to be countered.
Font had two options at this point, and neither worked. The first was to try to walk in on Assunção without the jab, which is something that Font isn’t really good at; without the jab, he’s an eighth of the fighter he could be, and Assunção just countered him easily when he didn’t cover his entries. The second was to just try to keep jabbing, which also didn’t work, as Assunção commanded the third round with the counter-jab; Font would jab from too far out and Assunção would catch it with his rear hand, as he did before, but instead of just backing off, he’d snap jabs off his lead hand knowing Font was close enough to be hit.
Assunção even used the same tricks for his takedown entries; Assunção shot underneath the first jab that Font threw in round 2, and as Font expected Assunção to drop back off the hand-trapping and chase him back (the same expectation that got Font knocked down in round 1), Assunção just dropped a level to get to Font’s hips. This allowed the terrific black belt to control the rest of round 3, to a clear 30-27 if not wider.
Font was not meant to be a showcase; a solid top-10 BW on a two-win streak since the Assunção fight, there was genuine reason to think he’d be tough for Assunção on the basis of his length and his jab. Assunção instead put on a clinic of dealing with the longer man, and left Font unable to do much at all. It’s important to note that the pace of the fight wasn’t particularly slow, just not the one Font wanted to enforce; Assunção’s game is not the utter inertia of someone like Tyron Woodley, his limitation of exchanges is not the end but a means towards rigging the ones that he allows in his favor.
The other obvious thing to note for Assunção so far is his versatility; even in just his last two wins, he dealt with two very different styles extraordinarily convincingly, equally comfortable working in open-stance and picking off an orthodox jab. Assunção’s best decisive wins show this further; Aljamain Sterling and Pedro Munhoz didn’t meet Assunção in the best forms of their careers, but they were competent fighters and better athletes, and Assunção made them look impotent.
The Top-5
Pedro Munhoz was an undefeated RFA champion when he made his UFC debut against Assunção, on short notice, so the win isn’t as meaningful as it could be; in fact, the fight was somewhat impressive from Munhoz in terms of how competitive it turned out, considering that he was facing a top contender in his first fight with the promotion. On the other hand, Munhoz was not one who made massive improvements to get to his top-5 form, it was more that he faced uncommonly disciplined pocket-operators in his first few (Assunção and Jimmie Rivera); the Munhoz who Assunção faced was certainly a dangerous foe, durable and powerful and persistent, and Assunção won convincingly despite all that.
Munhoz wasn’t as strategically-astute a performance from Assunção as Font was, and that could’ve been Assunção growing smarter with his years or just Munhoz being far more of an unknown quantity at the time. When Munhoz jabbed, though, the counters came back quick nevertheless.
Assunção’s inside-angle work against Munhoz wasn’t under usual circumstances; the orthodox Munhoz’s outside leg kicks had been put to early use, so Assunção spent more time in southpaw in this fight. That said, it was congruent in character to the Lopez fight, just mirrored; for example, as Munhoz took the outside angle, it was Assunção’s right hook he ran into, not his left, as Assunção used his rear-hand to parry the punch.
However, what’s different here is the intentionality of the two entries afterward; Assunção isn’t just the kind to punish his opponent’s angle-taking from the inside, he takes the inside-angle on his own, for a few reasons. One, it allows him to quickly angle into the open side to end the exchange. Two, just as the outside-angle shortens the rear hand by lining it up with the centerline of Munhoz, the inside-angle lengthens the rear-hand and sends it on a different trajectory. Munhoz looked to parry the straight as he saw Assunção take a step, and it may have worked if Assunção had sent it directly down the center; however, the loop of the inside-angle rear hand slots it cleanly around the side of the parry.
The short way of putting all this is that the effectiveness of footwork in exchanges is less about the “best” angle and more about how each option is used. The rear hand is quickened by the classical angle, but it doesn’t uniformly benefit.
Assunção’s boxing on the lead got a brief look in the Lopez fight, but the Munhoz fight is a strong showing in that respect. Munhoz isn’t a particularly good defensive fighter, mostly just a double-forearm guard at this stage, and Assunção tore it apart. An underrated tool of Assunção’s is his jab, considering his reputation for waiting on the counter; against Font he fired it consistently on the counter, and here, he doubles and triples and paws with the jab to draw Munhoz’s guard and punch around it with wide rights and uppercuts.
In all the discussion of Assunção’s footwork, one thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Assunção’s ringcraft; Assunção is a strong ring general, and his defensive clinching to turn an urgent marauding Munhoz to the fence is a good example (as are the previous examples of Assunção angling out of exchanges). He’s very aware of where he is in the cage, and his strong distancing informs his ringcraft; for the most part, an opponent like Rob Font can’t push him back consistently without eating counters that put him off, with the exception being inhumanly durable fighters like Pedro Munhoz.
Assunção steps on Munhoz’s foot as he kicks from southpaw, slipping as Munhoz pulls it back, but immediately comes back up in orthodox, obstructs Munhoz’s leaping left hand, and laces him with a clean left hook. Nothing particularly consistent here, just a cool moment.
Munhoz was an opponent who wanted more than anything else to force close-quarters exchanges; for a fighter who lives on limiting them, this was difficult on paper, but Assunção outfoxed the Young Punisher at every turn. He beat the wild banger at his own game, and did it relatively safely. The other well-appreciated win for Assunção was the opposite of Munhoz, a fighter who wanted to box less than Assunção did; the comparison that arises in thinking about Aljamain Sterling is light-heavyweight Jon Jones, a fighter who wants to either be all the way in (clinching and grappling) or all the way out (kicking). While the way Assunção approached that fight wasn’t necessarily entertaining, it was a win worth having.
Assunção isn’t a dedicated kick-counterer, but Sterling made it a bit too easy; he didn’t set them up or do anything but kick, and Assunção found his shots reliably. As both the Font and Sterling fights showed, fighting long against Assunção is more difficult than it seems.
Where Assunção’s shortcomings have reared their head, they’ve still largely led to respectable performances; however, it isn’t hard to see a common thread among the fighters who have given the Brazilian his hardest fights.
The Top-2
Essentially, Assunção’s only BW losses have come to opponents who are constitutionally difficult for the exchange-limiting counterpuncher; other strong boxers who can beat him in extended exchanges, and (most obviously, perhaps most crucially) feint-heavy styles. Assunção isn’t bad at dealing with feints, necessarily; he’s had his moments in all but one of his most difficult 135 outings, but he’s an information-heavy fighter and messing with that collection is integral to dealing with him over the distance.
The most obvious example of this is TJ Dillashaw, the all-time great and former bantamweight king who brought a pharmaceutical interpretation to the phrase “the best never rest”. Dillashaw ticked all the boxes; he wasn’t defensively deep either, but he was crafty and could deal with specific tricks (which makes Assunção’s keying on specific tactics difficult to implement), he was tremendously high-volume, and his game was 4 parts throwaway static and 1 part action. At the time of the first fight, he was already a handful for a pure-counterpuncher, and at the time of the second, he had twice ripped Renan Barao to pieces for waiting on the counter. While the second bout was decisive for Dillashaw, it wasn’t easy, and the first fight turned out a near-coinflip that the veteran edged.
Regardless of losing the second one and arguably losing the first, Raphael Assunção is one of the few opponents of Dillashaw who placed a similar emphasis on footwork in the pocket; it was minimalist where Dillashaw’s angular attack was flashy, but Assunção found ways to out-position Dillashaw a few times in both bouts. Again, he keyed on the inside-angle, with jabs from there and linear kicks to make the step-in harder, but there’s one additional detail that made Assunção’s inside-angle work against Dillashaw.
The first exchange above. In the first image, Dillashaw is just taking the outside step; it’s a shallow angle, as both men are still facing one another, and the angle is just to shorten the right hand by giving it a straighter path to Assunção’s head.
The second image is when the counter lands, and the thing to pay attention to is Assunção’s positioning. He’s pivoted a bit on his lead foot, and he’s exaggerated that effect by punching across his body as if he’d pivoted even harder to his right; had Dillashaw not shifted with his entry, Assunção would have squared TJ up with that pivot. Because he did, Assunção is at a weird angle to TJ; Dillashaw isn’t even facing Assunção, and Raphael is landing over his lead shoulder. The small adjustment turned a small positional edge for Dillashaw into a massive one for Assunção.
Another moment, this from the rematch. Assunção sees Dillashaw look to step outside the lead foot, and responds with a slick shift; he pivots off his rear foot to step into southpaw, drags down Dillashaw’s straight, and lands a cuffing right hook as he angles out.
Ultimately, though, looking for simple solutions to complex problems can only go so far, and this is something that Assunção also ran into against Cory Sandhagen; Assunção’s toolbox is small and deep, and a fighter as crafty as Dillashaw (who can feint and pull counters out of Assunção risk-free, to figure out the full extent of the few tools he has) is always going to be difficult to beat without breadth-of-skillset in addition to depth.
The final fight of interest in looking at Assunção against certifiably elite fighters is his first against Marlon Moraes; Moraes won the rematch even more decisively than Dillashaw won his, but the first Moraes bout shows everything both good and bad about the Brazilian vet. A former WSOF champion who drew the top-5 Assunção in his very first UFC bout, the promotion clearly wanted Moraes to put him away; while they only had to wait about a year-and-a-half for that, on that night, Assunção snatched away the prospect’s hype like a thief in the night.
Moraes isn’t the shifty twitchy type that Dillashaw or Sandhagen is, but he’s very good at drawing counters, and that’s what made him so hard for Assunção to deal with. The best example might be the second clip; Moraes feints a jab to draw Assunção’s left hook, ducks underneath as he pivots into Assunção’s stance, and lands a left hook of his own.
Assunção also had a great deal of trouble closing Moraes down to do work on the lead, as Moraes proved to be great on the counter himself. The counterkicks are the most unique part of this, but in general, Moraes’ speed edge and strong positioning in the pocket gave Assunção fits.
If Assunção deserved to win (and he didn’t), it was on the basis of a moment per round. Even those largely weren’t on the counter, but by drawing Moraes’ counters; the one in round 3, for instance, was a jab feint to draw Moraes’ left hook and crack him over top of it. Even so, they were only moments, and Assunção coming away with the win was fairly doubtful.
Assunção getting the official decision aside, Moraes 1 (and 2) was more an exploration of his limitations than of his strengths; Assunção’s speed disadvantage inside and a strong boxer across from him made him look somewhat pedestrian. That said, it says a lot that Assunção’s limitations were only really shown in fights against the very best that 135 has to offer.
Concluding Thoughts
After the fight against Font, where Assunção closed the gate shut on a man’s face again, the interview was extremely telling as to the spot that the UFC has assigned to him; regardless of one’s feelings towards Assunção as a fighter or an entertainer, a fighter on a long winstreak having to plead to his boss on live television to get a title shot he’s earned is deeply uncomfortable. Even more uncomfortable was how the UFC responded to that win and that plea; TJ Dillashaw was moving down to 125, so Assunção got a rematch with Moraes for no belt. Like Jussier Formiga at flyweight with the Benavidez rematch, like himself three years prior with the Dillashaw rematch (when the UFC wanted Cody Garbrandt to fight for the belt and not the Brazilian no one knows), a victim of circumstance.
The irony, of course, is that the style that brought Assunção such longevity and such a ludicrously strong resume (at a division that’s not forgiving to fighters lacking in dynamism) is also the thing that turned his career into MMA’s adaptation of Waiting For Godot. Even now, on a two-fight skid, the UFC is looking to squeeze one more use out of Assunção, again for Garbrandt’s sake, to give their most marketable bantamweight a shot at getting back on the horse against an aging respected name. It’s likely that Assunção shuts the gate again; however, the gate above him is also locked for him, and his unwanted status as the greatest to never receive (if not “never earn”) a title shot is likely secure. Ultimately, though, that reflects far worse upon the politics of the UFC than it does upon Recife’s quiet man.
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