Against A Wall: Raphael Assunção vs. Victor Henry
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC
Even among the annals of Brazilians defying time, one professional stands alone.
For all the development that has occurred in mixed martial arts over a few decades, the predominant metagame at almost every division lends itself to careers that are nasty, brutish, and short. The best indicator of success for a fighter on the rise tends to be how much volume they can enforce, by any means necessary and where getting hit back is just the cost of doing business — and a strategy of minimizing that cost runs into structural roadblocks at every turn. When rising in the ranks depends just as much on optics as on skill, a fighter has very little incentive to go off the beaten path in developing a style built on something that isn’t volume — MMA judging is inconsistent-at-best when it comes to properly valuing clean connections over empty throwing, the matchmaking strongly favors fighters who do a lot of things, and the sport itself doesn’t have the depth-of-coaching that a sport like boxing does to develop and impart comprehensive systems of mitigation (in a sport where there are so many more threats to mitigate).
However, the benefits of going the other way tend to reveal themselves as a fighter gets deeper into their careers — particularly at the most merciless divisions, where every subsequent generation of fighter is prepared to throw more shots in a shrinking window with the craft to back that up. When the average fighter starts to lose their appetite for danger or their ability to keep up on sheer activity, a career among the best becomes almost impossible to maintain; ceteris paribus, a win condition being defined as “who goes first, and who goes more” will usually favor the fighter who’s fresher and younger. That said, more and more elite fighters have shown the benefit of approaching fights in a different way — Alexander Volkanovski and Leon Edwards rose to prominence not just for craft in enacting aggression but also in defusing it, and Deiveson Figueiredo’s strategic switch to that end allowed him to return to his winning ways against an opponent in Brandon Moreno who seemed to have a bit more gas in the tank.
If there’s one archetype that defines the benefits and the drawbacks of anti-volume, it is (for whatever reason) the old cagey Brazilian. From Jose Aldo to Francisco Trinaldo to Jussier Formiga, several have lasted far longer than they should have at the elite level, based on some mixture of keen positional attention and craft in transition — but the example that tells the story clearest is Raphael Assunção. Pernambuco’s bantamweight spoiler stayed among the elite for years at a time, held away from the title shot more by politics than anything else, and picked up win after win over fighters who’d soon reveal themselves to be absolute monsters. Staying a concern at the top-2 level of a top division all the way to 36 years old, Assunção finally seemed to have to pay the piper himself — and yet at 40, he turned back a contender who seemed to embody the idea of volume beating all. Victor “La Mangosta” Henry had defeated a booming counterpuncher in Raoni Barcelos with style and ferocity as a massive underdog, and seemed poised to address another crafty Brazilian in the same way — however, it turned out that Henry wasn’t quite prepared for the lesson that so many other great bantamweights had undergone.
I — Victories
Victor Henry entered as a massive favorite to defeat Assunção, and the reasons were obvious considering his previous bout; against a fighter in Raoni Barcelos who many considered an elite bantamweight in waiting, Henry didn’t just look well-schooled and sharp, but also appeared to be a tremendous physical test for anyone. Even though he was on the old side for contenders at 135 (at 35 years old), Henry’s durability and his absurd pace left Barcelos scrambling for breath, even when he could find a land that should’ve bought him a break. More importantly than just the physical attributes, Henry looked like a truly great tactician — in a fight where Barcelos was looking to punish him for every entry, Henry scrambled Barcelos from the outside with shocking consistency, and kept him from having any handle on the nature of the exchanges.
To simplify a delightfully complex fight, Henry/Barcelos was a showcase of Henry’s clever noncommittal volume against a terrific counterpuncher. From the outside, Henry would score with a varied array of kicks, and use the kicks as punch entries — drawing counters by throwing kicks away, punching into and off them (eventually using them to cover shifting entries), encouraging Barcelos not to react and rendering them safer as a scoring tool from outside of Barcelos’ range.
In exchanges, Henry had a lot of sharp looks as well (particularly defensively) but the fight largely hinged on his ability to force activity from Barcelos with the jab. Barcelos was keen on at least addressing everything Henry threw at him, and this meant that even missed jabs or punished jabs gave Henry reactions— allowing him to pair off the lead hand, feint to draw the counters and punish them, and keep Barcelos moving. Countering individual jabs was obviously necessary, but it also didn’t have the impact on the strategy of Henry that Barcelos would have needed — he wouldn’t stop jabbing, he’d just adjust to Barcelos’ reactions to it, and take any damage as the cost of depleting Barcelos with his presence.
Driving the pace wasn’t purely an exercise of dictating entries for Henry, however — Henry’s biggest triumph was denying Barcelos safe resets after exchanges. Barcelos’ counters are an independent threat, but they also exist to limit the pace — scaring opponents away from pressing in, if only for a moment, to reposition and go again. Henry’s ability to safely enter exchanges, as well as his freakish durability, meant that Barcelos didn’t have that luxury; Henry would consistently shift in or jab directly after a trade, breaking the rhythm that Barcelos was enforcing and blurring the lines between “trade” and “rest” that Barcelos desperately needed. Even when Henry was going in and out, the fight was built to feel like one 15-minute exchange for Barcelos — which essentially no fighter is prepared for.
The concerns for Raphael Assunção in this sort of fight were evident — at 40 years old with a career dating back to 2004, he likely wasn’t the sort of fighter to stand up to a pace as grueling as that of Victor Henry. The Brazilian had some brisk fights against the likes of Pedro Munhoz and TJ Dillashaw, but those were more than five years prior, and his most characteristic showings were always at a steady, deliberate cadence — and Henry proved against Barcelos that he wasn’t the kind to be scared into doing that. He could navigate sophisticated counterpunching in the pocket if he needed to, and even if he couldn’t, Henry was a threat to just take the counter and follow Assunção out — and as reliant on clean exchange/rest distinctions as Barcelos was, Assunção’s low-paced counter game was arguably even moreso. Especially as he aged, the way for Assunção to win was to sidestep athletic tests, not to pass them — and Henry’s incessant and focused pace seemed like one he couldn’t sidestep.
To that end, “La Mangosta” went into the first round of the Assunção fight intent on putting similar tools on display as he did against Barcelos — this time, against an opponent who was far more willing to give ground and far less likely to sustain similar punishment for 15 minutes.
Henry’s first round against Assunção — who responded to many of Henry’s offerings by just backing up and circling — was inherently a bit slower than his torrid start against Barcelos; however, he did make good use of the time. Early in the fight, Henry’s kicking game was extremely effective — Henry consistently kicked through the open side to cut off Assunção’s movement against the fence, and looked to use the kicking threat to set up shifting offense.
Henry also looked to set up his boxing entries in the usual way — feinting into range with his hands and his feet, looking to draw Assunção’s hands out and fire over them with rounder shots. Assunção putting himself on the fence so comfortably gave Henry even more scope than he had against Barcelos, in theory; without being able to back up, Assunção would need to put his defense in the pocket to the test. Assunção was legendarily difficult to hit, but more because of his distancing and footwork (as seen later in the fight) than his reactions in close — so pressure and smart volume wasn’t a bad path.
Classic Victor Henry, putting all of the aforementioned tools from the Barcelos fight together. Henry feints him backwards, finds the front kick clean, is able to draw a counter on his terms from Assunção with his entry, and crack him with the right hook as Assunção figured it was time to circle away and reset. Assunção’s style requires his counters to end the trade, but for as long as Victor Henry could create exchanges reliably, he’d be prepared to make sure that didn’t happen.
Despite the sharpest looks of a contender on the rise, however, Assunção had some tricks up his sleeve; after all, he’d spent an entire career at the top of a striker-heavy division fighting opponents with deep and developed skillsets to enforce volume. From the cutting angular assault of TJ Dillashaw to the indefatigable pressure of Pedro Munhoz to the slick and smooth jab of Rob Font, Assunção had seen it all and had wins to his name against all of them. From the very beginning of the fight, Assunção had the right ideas — and he went to work taking away Victor Henry’s tools one by one.
II — Solving The Jab
The trouble with dealing with a volume-fighter like Henry was encapsulated best by Barcelos — dealing with each strike as it comes simply isn’t viable for very long, for a variety of reasons. When Henry jabbed, he wasn’t looking for a big damaging connection as much as he was searching for information — and the vast majority of possible responses would provide the sort of information that Henry could plausibly build on. Slip the jab and Henry could start firing the straight on half-beats or turning to the left hook; counter it with enough predictability, and he’ll just start feinting and punishing his opponent for throwing it. Reactive answers still largely leave the volume-fighter in the driver’s seat — give a good one enough shots at a specific problem, and they’ll find a way past it eventually, particularly if they have the durability to afford a few wrong answers on the way. However, Assunção’s fight against Rob Font — one of the best late-career performances in MMA history against a genuinely elite boxer — showed his ability to solve the problem one layer earlier, and he went to work doing the same against Henry.
Assunção’s consistently brilliant game off the handfight has been his most useful tool against jabbers and volume-fighters, and Victor Henry quickly ran into problems looking to pile output onto Assunção early as a result. From the start of the fight, Assunção played a cautious and mobile game built around parrying Henry’s lead hand from both stances — the most obvious result being that it makes straight-punching an absolute headache. While jabbing a southpaw is far more feasible than many fighters make it seem, Assunção was consistently pawing at Henry’s lead hand and obstructing the shortest path that Henry could take to his face, and kept it up when he went back to orthodox.
For a fighter used to touching his way into exchanges, Assunção’s approach represents some very real problems — as Henry wasn’t able to get the right distance to set up his offense. Trying to jab in through Assunção’s hand just meant that he had the right distance to put combinations on the air at arm’s length from Assunção — whereas when Henry jabbed, Assunção could use the jab on his palm as a reliable trigger for his counters. Combined with his consistent lateral movement along the fence, the parrying game set up a buffer zone for Assunção — he knew that Henry was making an entry far before he was at any real risk of getting hit, and Henry paid the price.
Assunção’s other big conceptual tool was his transitional work — which also benefitted greatly from his control of the handfight. When Henry started pressuring harder, Assunção could keep catching the straights, and transition quickly from those touches to the clinch to turn Henry around and defuse the pressure. Even more usefully, obstructing the straights naturally encourages an opponent to go for slower and rounder shots around Assunção’s arms — giving Assunção as much time as necessary to respond and close the distance.
Even by the end of the first round, Assunção’s command of the space via the handfight was giving Henry fits, although the round was competitive as a whole. Assunção taking away the straights allowed him to adjust a bit more easily to the kicks of Henry, Henry couldn’t enter without Assunção feeling him coming a mile away to counter, and the resets were inaccessible (as Henry couldn’t close the distance nor fluster Assunção into repositioning inefficiently). Assunção was in full control of when they exchanged, regardless of the volume that came his way — because Henry was largely throwing the combinations at the wrong distance, and had no way to gauge the right one by continuing to box up Assunção’s glove. If Henry had tried to cross that buffer without the option of feinting or touching his way in, the concern is what happened in Assunção vs. Font — where the distance is off and the counterpuncher can intercept the blind lunge forward with ease.
Assunção’s first round against Henry was truly brilliant, in that he was able to reduce an otherwise-unwinnable physical test into a fight where his reactions or durability were hardly relevant at all; where someone like Barcelos leaned on his power and speed to convince Henry that exchanges weren’t a smart idea, Assunção had to do none of that, because Henry just couldn’t find him to make the exchanges happen. Henry’s best strategy to push in on Assunção and create a high-paced fight ceased to be relevant by the fifth minute— and as much as Henry tried to adapt to find a way in, rounds 2 and 3 were decided by Assunção taking away Henry’s primary path and getting more information by the second. Ultimately, Henry not being able to enforce a pace was the end of any consistent win condition — every solid moment afterwards was on Assunção’s terms, and the great Brazilian went to work taking each idea away.
The last big threat Assunção had to solve from Henry was his kicking game — Henry wasn’t just a smart attritive kicker, the strategy could also pay dividends as an alternate method of creating entries after Assunção had already shortchanged the jab. To his credit, Henry seemed to recognize this possibility — in round 2, he had some moments where he stopped pushing in so hard behind the jab, spending some time throwing away and feinting kicks to pressure from a longer range and introduce another threat off the handfight.
Unfortunately for Henry, committing to kicks lost him the second round due to a few well-timed takedowns by Assunção — Henry’s own corner recommended that he abandon the kicking game, and the few kicks that he attempted in round 3 saw Assunção quickly counter or threaten the takedown. Assunção allowed Henry no free actions, and while he spent much of the fight along the fence, Henry was left with no safe paths to hit him.
III — Control
Going into the third round, Victor Henry easily could’ve been down 2 — while the first was fairly close, round 2 saw him give up enough top time that the judges favoring him was unlikely, and he’d taken some huge shots to boot. For a builder like Henry, this was the worst possible case; he’d done some attrition but not nearly enough, Assunção wasn’t diminished or broken-down by it, and he’d need an incredibly decisive third round to have much of a shot at winning the fight. Where Assunção could turn the fight on a dime with a singular shot — stealing close rounds from the likes of Font and Marlon Moraes off isolated reads — Victor Henry needed minutes, and Assunção didn’t leave many for him to take. As Henry pushed forward even harder to find the finish he needed, Assunção’s style only deepened in response.
Starting round 3, Assunção turned to his own lead hand with a bit more consistency; as he showed in the third round with Font, Assunção’s jab is more of an annoying intercepting shot than a systematic offense-builder, but it was a solid look as Henry looked to make up ground predictably behind his own jab. Assunção continued to give ground as he caught Henry’s leads, but not freely — as he left a jab behind each time, conditioning Henry to parry before firing the cross-counter as soon as Henry started to settle into a catch-and-pitch jabbing match.
In that same vein, Assunção’s varied timing and rhythm off the handfight took a visible toll on Henry’s reactions as the fight went on; as seen earlier, Assunção had converted the grab into clinches and takedowns, and the timing of his left hand after the grab was far from consistent. Assunção’s sneaky shifts as he moved laterally meant that the counter could be a snappy jab or a booming rear hand, and Assunção’s rear hand counter wasn’t consistently on the same beat off the grab either (he often hit directly off the touch, but occasionally he’d leave it a beat). All of this to say, after a point, Assunção had Henry so immensely flustered that he could use the threat of the handfight to just shove Henry away when he wanted some room — something that Raoni Barcelos would’ve killed to be able to do in round 3.
Even more than Assunção becoming sharper over the final round, the most marked impact on the fight going into round 3 was how uncomfortable Henry was with having so little information to build on in any phase — over ten minutes, Henry had found some success and some failure, but his successes had all been taken away, and his failures had been impossible to use as the basis for any future success. Where Barcelos had also won the first few minutes of the Henry fight, Henry was able to adapt to the specific tactics that Barcelos had been using— as he started rolling with the big combinations and intercepting with short counters, and pushing a pace that rendered any success completely unsustainable. However, Assunção had shut him out of the phase where he could build and learn off responses — Henry could’ve spent the previous ten minutes jabbing a wall and come out no worse. As a result, where Henry had seemed impossible to fluster through his UFC debut, he seemed to get caught by surprise by every counter in his sophomore outing — even as Assunção worked in short and seemingly simple combinations, the depth of his approach allowed him to find the big fight-turning moments that Henry had previously seemed immune to.
Assunção’s left hook became invaluable through the third round, for several reasons. The first is obvious — particularly against an opponent looking to singlemindedly close the distance, very few counters are more useful. Henry had found a few left hooks in the middle of round 2, letting Assunção catch the jab before looping around his outstretched arm — in round 3, he tried again, only for Assunção to adjust and find a thunderous hook that sent Henry stumbling backwards. Assunção wasn’t just a terrific strategist, but also a masterful tactician — Henry couldn’t get away with any single idea (shifting in off the kick threat, the rear kick, the hooks) more than a few times for free.
Assunção’s lead hook also turned into solid combination-counters — Henry was overwhelmed enough by Assunção’s depth on single blows off the handfight, so even when Raphael toyed with giving Henry the extended exchanges he needed to look good, Henry was too surprised to actually succeed there. The short left hook herded Henry into solid straights, and Assunção's use of the linear kick off the handfight to hide his backfoot shifts was a neat trick.
More than anything, round 3 hinged on Assunção’s consistent use of transitions and the clinch to fluster Henry into ineffectiveness — he still largely couldn’t get past the handfight, and Assunção’s setups only got smarter as the fight went on. Assunção’s handfighting naturally lent itself to threatening wrist control and stepping into the chest-to-chest, and Henry’s unwillingness to allow that meant that Assunção could play it off the counters. In reverse, Assunção could also punch into the clinch; consistently converting missed shots into collar ties and physically turning Henry away from the center, leaving Henry further away from cornering Assunção the more aggressively he tried.
It isn’t to say that Raphael Assunção had an easy win against Victor Henry, who remained threatening and active the whole way through; Assunção still had to ride out the last bit of the fight with a single-leg attempt on the fence, and Henry’s bodywork in the first round likely went unappreciated by the judges. However, he did end up with a 30-27 on every card despite giving up the backfoot and spending a great deal of the fight on the fence — capping off a performance that stands with the most impressive of the year. Victor Henry was not meant to be a winnable fight for Assunção by any stretch of the imagination, and yet the Brazilian worked his magic once again.
IV —In Sum
Victor Henry even fighting Raphael Assunção was a bit of a disservice to him, considering the strength of his debut win over Raoni Barcelos — in a just world, “La Mangosta” would have been fighting into the top-10 off such a dazzling win, and that makes his loss to Assunção doubly troubling to his prospects moving forward. That said, Henry is likely still a big concern to the top-10 level of 135, as challenges such as Assunção are incredibly rare. Strong outfighters don’t grow on trees in MMA, and Henry ran into one of the savviest ring generals in the history of the sport; it is far more likely that current top 135ers are more flattering matchups for such an offensive buzzsaw at every range. Henry’s issues against Assunção — some problems initiating pocket-exchanges if the jab is proactively taken away, defensive issues in fights where he isn’t given enough exchanges to gain comfort — aren’t problems that every 135er can take advantage of; it’s very possible that Henry becomes just another top talent who looked a bit uncomfortable with the weirdest elite bantamweight that has ever existed. It happened to TJ Dillashaw, it happened to Rob Font, it happened to Moraes and Munhoz and Aljamain Sterling — if there’s a loss that doesn’t represent a ceiling, it’s one to a man who’s spoiled the rise of almost every elite fighter he’s faced.
That said, Raphael Assunção is something special. Even his last winstreak — featuring two arguable future #1s of the division and a top 5 contender in waiting — seemed like the great Recifense raging against his impending end as a going concern at the top of 135; he’d apparently been barred from the titleshot due to circumstances outside of his control, so he was 135’s Sisyphus for years on end until he inevitably lost another half-step. In the last few years, that half-step has been lost — the defeat to Cody Garbrandt likely wouldn’t have occurred had Assunção fought him during his previous winstreak, and Ricky Simon (while promising) isn’t the sort of style matchup that historically has caused Assunção all that much trouble. Without a doubt, Assunção is near the end of his career, and he knows it — which is what makes his performance against Henry so impressive. Assunção spent years making terrifying athletes look like they were fighting a mind-reader, but managing another ice-cold and commanding performance 18 years into his career at 40 years old (at a young division, against a contender who set a volume record on Raoni Barcelos) is the sort of feat that can’t be overstated. Raphael Assunção stands as the most instructive fighter who no prospect seems to have learned from — an entirely unique presence in MMA who will remain the most underappreciated fighter of his class. If there’s a bright side to the whole thing, it’s likely that the men he beat will keep carrying the flag for the best division in the sport.