Bringing Back: Brad Riddell
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC
(Full Disclosure: The last time I wrote an article previewing a lightweight prospect, their next performance went poorly, so let’s hope for better results this time around.)
Seemingly overnight, the upper echelon of lightweight has gone from being one of the sport’s deepest & richest divisions to a talented, yet flawed division filled with a surprising amount of old and shopworn veterans. Even streaking contenders like Charles Oliveira have a surprising amount of miles on them. The division is certainly a talented one, but it isn’t nearly as spry or fresh as it was a few years back.
The bright side is that this turnover could allow some genuinely special talent to rise to prominence in the next few years. Chief among them is former professional kickboxer and City Kickboxing alum, Brad Riddell. ‘Quake’ netted several kickboxing championships around New Zealand during his rise through the regional scene, but even in losses, Riddell demonstrated elite sensibilities that could (and likely will) pay dividends in his current transition to MMA. After watching him dismantle Magomed ‘Russian Ringo’ Mustafaev at UFC Fight Night 168, I knew I was watching someone special.
All the Right Stuff
Breadth and depth; few fighters in MMA boast skillsets that could be described as either, yet Brad Riddell brings both not only in his approach to fighting, but also in his strapping posterior chain. Like his teammate Israel Adesanya, Brad Riddell bucks the trend of a more traditional Dutch kickboxing stance and approach, but his actual game isn’t anything like his middleweight counterpart. His stocky frame and punching mechanics prioritize a more even-weighted stance replete with fast step-ins, blistering feints, and a depth of lateral movement. He’s exactly the kind of technician that analysts like myself fall head-over-heels for in kickboxing, so imaging the ceiling of such a fighter in MMA is almost tantalizing.
It doesn’t take a lot of tape study to deduce that Brad is an enormously well-schooled striker. He sees Mularkey’s dipping entry into the pocket, and instinctively responds by weaving slightly into his check left hook.
Riddell’s money punch is the left hook. He folds over his lead hip, feints, and squares his shoulders to disguise his entries. Then, he shells in an effort to draw out a response from Doumbé, before rolling to catch the Frenchman’s left hook as Riddell counters with his own left hook and pivots off.
If I had to classify Riddell, the loose term I’d use is ‘boxer-technician.’ Against taller opponents such as Doumbé and Eersel, Brad made a commitment to body punching and when closing down opponents from a longer range, he actively looks for shifting combinations. He usually closes exchanges with kicks, but he isn’t as dextrous an outside kicker as his teammate, Adesanya. Not entirely unlike his former opponent, Cédric Doumbé, he functions more as a boxer with kicks.
Brad is diligent about feinting his way into the pocket, as well as covering his entries with posts or frames. He’s rarely caught out blind, or positionally compromised.
In an open-stance matchup, Brad and Russian Ringo paw their lead hands, and Ringo moves laterally to his left. Brad steps to the inside angle off a lead hand feint, and lands a shifting right hook a half-beat behind the feint, which in turn, shifts him back into orthodox. The following left hand would’ve continued the shifting combination, but Ringo had already been knocked down by that point.
As Alexander Volkanovski has demonstrated in his last few performances, this technical approach lends itself to a variety of different applications. Whether pressuring or fighting off the backfoot, Riddell’s lateral movement, angular attack, and counterpunching facilitates quite a bit of dimensionality. With the right tools in place, this game can play out as an all-terrain one.
Experience at the Highest Level
The two best names on Brad Riddell’s kickboxing record are not wins, but that doesn’t mean they are without merit. Riddell fought to a split decision with Glory welterweight champion and international badass, Cédric Doumbé, and lost a competitive decision to ONE lightweight champion, Regian Eersel. Losses to these champions is not a mark against the New Zealander, but instead reveals the level of opposition he was competing against for the duration of his kickboxing career.
Riddell feints with his lead hand to draw a reaction from Doumbé before taking a step to the inside angle and pivoting. Simultaneously, he posts his glove across the Frenchman’s face, impeding his vision, before attempting a 2-3.
Riddell squares his shoulders against Doumbé, with his right hand extended to impede the Frenchman’s visibility. With his shoulders square, this loads up the left hook upstairs for Brad. He levers off the punch by going to the body before slamming an uppercut down the middle, splitting Doumbé’s high guard. The Frenchman attempts to use this as a catch-&-pitch counter opportunity with his own left hook, but Riddell attempts to answer with his own.
The Frenchman paws his lead hand to draw Riddell’s guard up before attempting a Dutch hand trap. Riddell’s guard stays up, and the two men exchange left hooks (Doumbé hits the body with his). As Brad is angling out, Doumbé catches him with a trailing leg kick.
After getting dropped with a vicious knee to the body at the hands of Regian Eersel in round 2 and despite being a mark for the champion’s intercepting knee counter all night (seeing as thought Riddell is ostensibly half the height of Eersel), Riddell charged forward like a workhorse against the towering kickboxer and continued breaking him down.
Riddell opens with a rear leg kick. As soon as his retracting leg touches the ground again, Brad hop-steps with his front foot wedged toward Eersel’s centerline. With his patented left-hook lever, he sneaks a body shot in and forces Eersel back to the ropes before attempting another left hook as Regian is angling off.
Volkanovski likely cribbed the ‘inside-leg kick entry into stepping combination’ tactic from Riddell, and rightfully so. It’s a good tool!
Riddell uses his 1-2 to play with plane of attack and occupy Eersel’s high guard. He continues angling left with his combinations, forcing the champion to turn. In response to Brad’s jab, Eersel attempts to counter with an intercepting knee as the New Zealander ducks to the outside. Instead, Riddell catches the kick with his lead hand, pivots off his lead leg to take an angle, and counters in combination as Eersel is shelling.
It needs to be said how impressive Riddell’s high-level kickboxing experience is when projecting a path forward in MMA. Competing with Doumbé and Eersel is all well and good, but outlasting them in three-round contests is a bit shocking. It speaks to Brad’s initiative, tact, and the dexterity of his approach that he managed to make close contests out of two of the best fighters the sport of kickboxing has to offer.
Rate of Improvement
Following the patterns of his teammates, Riddell shocked the hell out of me in his rapid rate of improvement in just two UFC showcases. An idiot could look at an experienced kickboxer and say the route to victory against these specialized fighters is through wrestling and grappling, but Brad hasn’t made this as easy as it might sound in his first two octagon appearances. Given the speed at which Adesanya and Volkanovski developed ancillary tools in their games, it is safe to assume that Brad Riddell is right on track in his development.
Mularkey sets up his double-leg attempt off a level-changing feint, and he’s able to draw a dipping response from Riddell. As soon as Mularkey gets in on Riddell’s hips, he switches the position of his legs while sprawling towards his right side. He immediately digs for an underhook on Mularkey’s right arm, who then attempts to drive through the shot to finish it. With a whizzer on the right side, Riddell sprawls onto his right hip, impeding Mularkey from driving further. As they stand up, Brad keeps hold of the whizzer and immediately looks to jut his head under Mularkey’s chin for a positional edge.
Speaking of feints, Riddell does something here that I have talked about extensively, but rarely ever see in MMA. He responds to Mularkey’s feints as if they were legitimate strikes, instead of biting or giving away something to be easily countered. This is an exceptional way to diffuse an avid feinter, since it disincentivizes opponents from feinting for free if they are likely to be punished for them. Also, Riddel is hitting the body, which I can never get enough of.
Against Magomed Mustafaev, Riddell was forced to walk a tighter line, since any overcommitment could lead to the athletic Russian grabbing a hold and wearing him down with unrelenting physicality. Brad diffused Mustafaev exceptionally well, and fought off the difficult grappling and clinch positions with serious aplomb. In his mere second UFC appearance, Riddell handled one of the division’s most relentless athletes through both skill and physicality. Hard not to be impressed with this one.
After suffering an early knockdown, Russian Ringo was eager to get back into the fight, but he resorted to long, wide overhands that missed by a mile. Points for the outside slip + pivot from Brad.
Along the fence, Riddell was diligent about fighting the grips from Mustafaev’s bodylock along the fence. Note how Brad switches his feet to build his base, to turn his back to the fence, while simultaneously grabbing an overhook on the right side. In the end, he winds up in an excellent position to stop a shot, with his base wide, grip-fighting with one hand and overhooking with the other.
It took Adesanya a few UFC performances before his clinch game developed beyond just a defensive area into an actual place of misery for opponents. Here’s hoping that Riddell follows suit and realizes that stuffing the takedown and making life awful for his opponents in lockups might just be the key to forcing them into his fight. Consistent sparring with Alexander Volkanovski seems like an excellent way to accomplish exactly that.
The Time is Now
Brad Riddell is a terrific and promising talent at 155, but he can’t afford to wait any longer to begin climbing the ranks. With so many enduring names in the top 15 showing some cracks, a technician as defined and competent as Riddell should be in the perfect position to begin an ascent. A few losses at lightweight, and you will swiftly be reduced from ‘promising talent’ to ‘fun action fighter’ status, which can be enormously tough to break out of. Riddell is capable of more.
Fortunately, he seems to have all of the pieces in place to make a potentially thrilling run at the lightweight elite. Take the base skillset of a powerfully constructed kickboxer, throw some solid takedown defense and clinch awareness into the mix, and sprinkle in some great athleticism for the relative division for good measure. That’s basically what Brad Riddell has at this moment in time. It is on him to build on this, and if his colleagues are any indication of where Riddell’s path might lead him, the future could be bright for ‘Quake.’
City Kickboxing continues to set a new precedent for strategic and technical depth in MMA, and Brad Riddell might just prove to be the kind of talent the lightweight elite has been missing.