Charles Jourdain: Giant Killing in the Clinch
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC
Halfway through the first round of his July 16th bout with Shane Burgos, Charles Jourdain was faced with a problem: having just spent the better part of the opening round with a much larger man glued to his back while trying to twist his head off, and despite working hard to survive and escape back to his preferred phase, Jourdain had in front of him an opponent who was going to relentlessly pursue more opportunities to impose his size and strength advantages.
Burgos has built a reputation as a marauding pressure-boxer over the course of his must-see UFC tenure. The UFC’s Featherweight division is ferociously competitive, and Burgos has certainly been able to leave an impression. Thus, Jourdain probably expected to face exactly that version of Burgos.
However, while Burgos was still plenty committed to pressuring Jourdain, the constant threat of Burgos’ clinch takedowns was unexpected: Burgos would slip a Jourdain straight left, grab a bodylock, and take Charles down. This prompted Jourdain to make a clever adjustment - rather than trying to just avoid the clinch, which would likely have been an unsustainable strategy given Burgos’s relentless aggression, Jourdain decided that is was imperative for him to enter the clinch on his terms.
As counterintuitive as it may seem to initiate clinches with an opponent who wants to grapple with you, being first provides a greater opportunity to establish favorable grips and positions which make defending the offensive grappling of your opponent much easier.
However, while getting to advantageous positions in the clinch served Jourdain well defensively, he understood that he could not allow the clinch to become a stagnant position. Given Burgos’s size and strength advantage, he would be able to force Jourdain back to the fence and work his way to a bodylock. To prevent Burgos from getting comfortable in the tie-ups, Jourdain immediately began off-balancing Burgos with trips when he would try to push forward to the fence.
Primarily, Jourdain would pair an overhook or underhook on one side with bicep or wrist control on the other. Combined with great head positioning, these positions allowed Jourdain to create the distance needed to land damaging knees.
Despite Jourdain’s intelligent adjustment, sometimes the margins are very thin in MMA. A minute into the second round, in a sequence very similar to the first clip posted above, Jourdain shifted forward with a left hand that Burgos slipped, but this time Burgos was the one who was more proactive, lowering his level to enter the clinch and snatching a rear waist lock, from which he worked to back mount, trapping Jourdain there for the remainder of the round.
Sensing that the second round might loom large on the judges scorecards and taking advantage of Burgos’s exhaustion brought about by his persistent knees to the body, Jourdain shifted his focus in the clinch in the last half of the third round from landing single hard shots to overwhelming Burgos with punches. As always though, Burgos, like many other of the UFC’s great featherweights, showed superhuman resilience by making it to the final bell.
Unfortunately for Jourdain, two of the three judges saw Burgos’s back control and neck crank attempt in the first round as more significant than the numerous spearing knees to the body shown above. Still, it’s not often that we get to see a comprehensive and skillful clinch attack in MMA and even if Burgos’s lack of positional awareness in the clinch made him a sort of a blank canvas, at least Jourdain took the opportunity to paint us a pretty picture.