The Boston Ripper: Calvin Kattar vs. Giga Chikadze
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Calvin Kattar spoiled the UFC’s next big contender, in every respect.
Walking into UFC on ESPN 32, Giga Chikadze was all but confirmed as the eventual challenger for the dominant featherweight champion. Leading a wave of Georgians into the UFC and claiming the left kick to the body as his exclusive intellectual property along the way, #8 “Ninja” had quickly entered himself into title talks with a shocking amount of credibility. What helped him, admittedly, was the matchmaking problems endemic in 145; the top prospects routinely (for some reason or another) destroyed each other in lateral moves, as a largely tenuous top-5 often kept their spots on the value of their names alone. However, the former kickboxer distinguished himself by carrying over a brisk schedule, racking up seven wins in two years against increasingly-skilled opposition. By the time Chikadze knocked out lightweight staple Edson Barboza in August, the other top-5 hopefuls (Arnold Allen and Josh Emmett) were stuck in place due to long stretches of inactivity — while #1 contender Max Holloway withdrew from his title fight after destroying all the other contenders, leaving the door wide open for anyone.
With those circumstances, one might begin to understand why Chikadze’s fight to officially enter the top-5 felt like a formality for much of the public — Barboza was still held in high esteem as a former top-5 lightweight, Chikadze had six straight wins before that, and no one else in the running for the title fight could lay claim to anything close. The other side of it was his opponent — whose path was exactly the opposite: a fighter with precious few easy fights but also very little momentum because of it. Unlike the other top-5 contenders, Calvin Kattar didn’t have much of a crowd behind him to serve as insulation from ranking risk, and he had spent his entire UFC career in a unique liminal space between prospecthood and contendership. “The Boston Finisher” had strolled into the promotion on short-notice as a fully formed fighter with a decade of professional experience behind him already, so every loss seemed to represent a hard ceiling he didn’t have the time to break — and while he impressively punched his way to #5 regardless, a superlatively violent and totally comprehensive loss to Holloway ostensibly closed the door. Even if Kattar had improbably returned to action looking like himself, the story didn’t appear to be about him — Chikadze was a freight train headed for the top, and the only thing in his way was a fighter who hadn’t exactly looked unstoppable, even before a historically catastrophic outing that’d end lesser fighters on the spot.
However, the iron-tough Bostonian has made a habit since his UFC debut of not quite following the script as the underdog, and his year in recovery was spent making sure January of 2022 would be no different. Calvin Kattar had been the ruin of many young contenders, and to the promotion’s surprise, Chikadze was one.
I — Giga-Round
While Giga Chikadze trademarking a left kick — a shot that, to anyone familiar with PRIDE FC, already had someone’s name on it — was a bit premature at best, he had his reasons for doing so; essentially all of Chikadze’s striking mixups and his habits are built around eventually finding his opponent’s liver through the open side. On the surface, this would appear to be a bad idea on principle, but if someone had to throw their lot in with a single tactic, the southpaw double-attack is one of the better bets out there. For an athlete like Chikadze — blisteringly quick and an insanely hard kicker — it makes perfect sense; genuinely strong and committed kickers are rare enough in mixed martial arts that most fighters don’t have a great idea on how to dissuade one of them, and the kick through the open side can stop an opponent in their tracks and deal attrition to the arms even if it’s blocked entirely (in fact, featherweight prospect Charles Jourdain has made that sort of damage an integral part of his style — even if you don’t get much out of it, kicking the open side is free the vast majority of the time). For many fighters, the choice against Chikadze is between trying to guess where his kicks are going, or giving ground when he looks like he’s going to do anything at all — and both of those options suit Chikadze just fine.
Against Calvin Kattar, Chikadze quickly got to work with his double attack, which made up the majority of his offense in the first round; Kattar had a reputation as a rigid orthodox high-guarder who struggled to deal with kicks, so Chikadze seemed well-positioned to blast away.
Chikadze started out the fight trying to blast out Kattar’s lead leg as quickly as possible — which is a defensible tactic, even if not quite a correct one. Renato Moicano had most of his success against Kattar with his low-kicking game, but Moicano’s versatile leg kick is what made the difference — where Kattar’s jab was consistently countered as he couldn’t get his leg out of the way, or the Dutch-style combos caught his leg in the middle of a retreat. In contrast, Ricardo Lamas and Jeremy Stephens trying to wreck a leg by simply kicking as hard as possible just met Kattar’s knee a lot of the time — and Chikadze’s speed and power meant that he could knock Kattar’s leg out of position regardless, but Kattar was consistently turning his knee out into the leg kick, and Chikadze didn’t link his leg kick with the ground he was able to pick up early with the blitzes.
When Chikadze went southpaw, he went crazy — and it’s easy to see why this tactic works so consistently. Chikadze’s rear kick is incredibly fast and he can throw his straight out of his stance (unlike a lot of his other boxing offense) — so the two look very similar early as Chikadze activates his hips. Waiting for the leg to leave the ground or to see Chikadze’s hand leaves someone far too little time to deal with either tactic, and it’s hard to split the difference in dealing with both (with the straight narrowing the guard, and the kick forcing it wide). Of course, the slip speaks to how much Chikadze trusts in this tactic, as he commits so hard to the kick that he doesn’t really bother to safely recover — and the rest of the round was spent on his back.
All that said, the dichotomy presented earlier for Chikadze’s opponent isn’t necessarily complete — and the best way to deal with the southpaw double-attacker has conventionally been to push them backwards to take some of the guesswork out. The classical example is Fedor Emelianenko vs. Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic — Cro Cop was as close to the true “owner” of the southpaw double-attack as anyone in MMA, but Emelianenko’s diligent and sound pressure meant that he had to risk getting crowded on one foot if the kick was thrown (and although Emelianenko’s defense to the kicks was also sound, the pressure meant he didn’t rely on it as much as he could have). This is why the double-attack isn’t quite as foolproof as it may seem in MMA — at this point, “crowding the kicker” is popular wisdom, so the user needs some way to dictate the range to keep both threats in play.
For some fighters, the path is enacting pressure themselves — Conor McGregor is a great example, where the Irishman would push his opponent back at a long range to start goading them into kicks or standing them up for the straight. Some other fighters rely a bit more on their soundness on the outside — Leon Edwards vs. Donald Cerrone was an obvious spot for the double-attack, for instance, and a great deal of Edwards’ focus was on breaking the line or closing into the clinch when Cerrone looked to simply sprint at him. For Giga Chikadze, however, the path to keeping his opponent from crowding him has generally been the simplest one — hit them very hard when they try, so they don’t try again. Chikadze’s fight with Omar Morales was a great example; when Chikadze started to fade a bit, Morales got more confident marching him down and jabbing him up, but Chikadze turned the round with an overhand that floored the Venezuelan. While Chikadze’s form leaves something to be desired in the boxing, he’s certainly a hard puncher regardless, and had the speed and the eye for openings that irked Kattar through the first couple rounds.
While the double attack didn’t quite pan out against Kattar, Chikadze did manage to buy some time occasionally with his own lead hand work. In fact, Chikadze had a couple exchanges in the middle of the round actually playing off his lead hand — playing the jab off the hook, varying the level of the hook, and drawing Kattar’s attention to his lead hand before stepping in with his right. Really, the problem was that Chikadze was too skittish to set traps like this consistently — he was too busy moving around to punch in combination, and by the time he was forced to settle down, he no longer had the capacity to box smartly.
Kattar mostly looked to keep Chikadze away from the open-stance, but Chikadze had at least one solid look from there when he got it — Kattar was keyed in on the straight left from southpaw, so Chikadze bursts to the outside angle to draw the parry before slotting a long right hook over the shoulder.
The best successes of Chikadze came from just the element of surprise — when Kattar got into a rhythm of pursuing Chikadze around the cage, expecting him to keep moving around and getting his feet in weird places. The oddest example was when Kattar got a hold of the jabbing battle — Chikadze’s counterjab had a few moments of success but he threw his whole body into it as Kattar feinted in, and yet Kattar still got stung stepping in as Chikadze turned his jumbled feet into a backfoot shift. Generally, this occurred as Chikadze broke the rhythm of his circling — almost using his compromised positioning as a trap to get Kattar to step in, before breaking into southpaw and blasting.
II — Tera-Footwork
While Chikadze clearly had an athletic edge in at least some respects over Kattar — he was more mobile and faster of foot, and his shots had a bit more snap to them compared to Kattar’s more planted and thudding blows — the game he played raised a very obvious question of efficiency. Chikadze’s movement around the cage suffered from his willingness to back all the way to the fence, but against Edson Barboza, he did a good job of staying mobile regardless. Barboza could control the center, but Chikadze would consistently break his rhythm with the straight or change directions along the fence, so Barboza resigned himself to not taking advantage of Chikadze being so easy to back up and move around. The trouble with Chikadze’s only deciding to move laterally when he was against the fence, of course, is that it inherently limits his options against a strong cage-cutter — but Barboza wasn’t that, and Calvin Kattar didn’t appear to be either.
In fact, for all of Chikadze’s oddness with his feet, Kattar had very similar issues in the other direction — the best showings for him were always when he didn’t need to dictate a direction. In neutral space and in jabbing range, Kattar was an absolute force, but putting the load on his feet to catch his opponent before he could jab them was a surefire way to get uglier fights from him. Kattar could quite nicely chase his opponent down when he was able to gauge with his lead hand (as his impressive debut against Andre Fili showed), but when Renato Moicano took the jab away entirely, tracking him became Sisyphean. It wasn’t even a guarantee that Kattar would decide to put Chikadze on the fence consistently for that reason; while he had the conditioning and durability to be a nasty pressurer, he never committed wholesale to pressure until his jab was working at full capacity, and would traditionally give ground freely until he had the distance read. Chikadze’s proclivity for southpaw games, his tricky movement, and his slightly longer range kept the possibility of frustrating Kattar’s jab in play — but unbeknownst to him, Kattar had a couple specific tools to deal with Chikadze’s best tactics and worst habits, forcing him to spiral into exhaustion with aplomb.
The most obvious deviation from Kattar’s usual process against Chikadze was his tendency to shift — Kattar’s left jab has always been his trademark tool and weapon, but he consistently stepped into southpaw against Chikadze as he advanced. In the open, this served to complicate the open-side kick — Chikadze couldn’t get as much respect with the hip feint, since the threat of the double attack was muted from the closed-stance (the kick would need a lot more setup to land below the elbow, and the straight has the shoulder in the way), so he’d concede to just backing up. The mechanics of the shift (the “switch-45”, as Jack Slack termed it) would also automatically angle him away, taking a bit of steam from the connection.
From the beginning of the fight, Kattar carrying himself to angles with the switch forced constant resets from Chikadze — and these were occasionally converted into offense from Kattar, but for the most part, Chikadze’s wide arcs to get away from Kattar outangling him (rather than pivoting to face him) was a win in itself for Kattar in exhausting the longer fighter. For instance, here’s Kattar forcing Chikadze to gallop around and break stance 3 times in 15 seconds. Also, the switch to cut the cage near the end was a clever little move, although it usually was used to get Chikadze to move instead of standing him still.
The best shifting offense for Kattar largely came from a classic Dustin Poirier look, however — not the angular stance-change, but the chasing one. Kattar consistently touched his way in with the jab to draw Chikadze’s retreat, and shifted into the opposite stance to stay in the kitchen with Chikadze — and this helped when Chikadze retreated linearly (where Kattar would just jab him more from the other stance)…
…when Chikadze was against the fence (where Kattar could cover a bit more ground shifting as Chikadze had one way to run)…
…and even occasionally when Chikadze looked to circle away, where the shift would allow Kattar to quickly track Chikadze through the angle instead of running past him and having to turn to face him. Not quite Petr Yan, but Kattar being more aware of the ways in which his feet can complicate a fighter trying to annoy him out of pocket-boxing clearly did him a lot of good. Obviously, the risk to shifting (getting caught between stances and with momentum committed) is still present — and Chikadze did time a few counters as Kattar got overaggressive, as noted earlier — but the lack of real threat in extended exchanges from Chikadze made it a valuable tool for Kattar.
The final little footwork trick from Kattar to note was the front kick — which was always in his game, the Burgos and Lamas fights had at least one gorgeous moment of Kattar surprising them from below, but the use of the kick to the body was new here. Clean lands certainly dealt attritive damage (drawing a few visible winces), but Kattar could also shift through the kick or the threat of the kick — getting Chikadze’s attention before putting a new jab back on him, keeping the pace up at range and safely forcing Chikadze back, and generally hiding the motion of his shifting. It was almost a prime Tony Ferguson performance, for most reasons than one — although a more accurate comparison may be Kattar’s teammate Rob Font, who did some similar things with the front kick against Cody Garbrandt.
By the end of the second, Chikadze — the former kickboxer who entered a -200 favorite, largely on the merit of his mobility — found himself struggling to keep up with Kattar’s footwork and positioning, and he was visibly worn from the effort. At that point, the fight completely unraveled — Chikadze had a few good looks in round 2 for sure, but the fight would proceed as one-way traffic and fully in Kattar’s wheelhouse.
III — Peta-Pocket
Calvin Kattar’s domain against Chikadze was always presumed to be in the exchanges, and this was for a couple reasons. While Chikadze could compete in shorter trades at range, his pocket defense and punching form got him in trouble. In a kick-centric fight, those shortcomings are fine; Chikadze can cover a lot of distance with his blitzes and hit very hard, so an opponent rightly preoccupied with his kicks would struggle to make form matter at all. However, when he was crowded by Calvin Kattar and no longer had the energy to move around as much, Chikadze had no choice but to put his hands to the test against one of the better neutral boxers in the sport — one with tremendous instincts, an understated ability to stay safe, and the tactical intelligence to punish everything Chikadze did.
The jabbing battle between Kattar and Chikadze wasn’t a total wash, as noted earlier — with Chikadze’s counter jab and his cross-counter having moments. However, Kattar had a few compounding advantages with his more granular and intelligent lead hand, primarily how he played havoc with Chikadze’s counters with his foot-feint and subsequently punished them. Kattar’s left hook was in rare form in this fight, although it was also helped by Chikadze mostly working in big running blitzes; Kattar could feint in and pivot to let Chikadze run past him, and lightly cuffing Chikadze between stances was enough to send him off-balance — so even Chikadze’s “lands” were mostly when he was outangled or reaching badly.
Kattar’s defense in the pocket was also tremendously helpful against Chikadze — largely the way he’d get behind his lead shoulder proactively off his own jab, muting the cross-counter before it could even be thrown. Chikadze generally needed longer combinations to work around Kattar’s guard, but (as seen in the last clip) he’d usually need to tank at least one big counter on the way there — in contrast, Kattar could take a Chikadze counter on the shoulder and keep pressuring or step in. This was valuable because Chikadze’s stance usually fell apart as he looked to exit quickly — so even if Chikadze looked to back him off, Kattar could stay inside and find him while only chancing desperate returns from someone in no position to exchange.
This exchange shows a lot of the previous considerations at work. First the shift — Kattar crowds him instantly. Chikadze finds a counterjab but he’s too busy trying to leave to sit down on it; Chikadze breaks stance while jabbing, and Kattar punches through it, leaving the exchange looking like this —
Kattar is in a strong stance, able to transfer weight into the right despite Chikadze finding the jab. Chikadze is totally squared despite throwing a low-commitment shot, essentially walking backwards while jabbing with no regard for his stance — the sort of thing you can get away with when you’re much faster and your opponent hasn’t been able to track you. Even if Chikadze had thrown a harder shot, Kattar was in a better spot to distribute the impact; on the other hand, even if Kattar didn’t punch as hard, Chikadze was in no spot to dissipate any of it.
Kattar draws Chikadze’s counter several times afterwards in the same clip — first with the foot-feint (pulling out counter jabs), and then with the actual jab, pulling back as he anticipated the cross-counter and jabbing him hard to end the trade. The sort of tricky arrhythmic jabbing seen here is usually a function of fighters consenting to the pocket with Kattar — Giga didn’t, and yet got torn apart by it anyway.
Kattar also apparently took another specific tip from his good friend Rob Font — the elite bantamweight made a habit of a jab that wasn’t just complex and building, but also uniquely and exhaustingly sticky. Kattar wasn’t able to build offense off this specific tactic as consistently as Font has, but he often simply grabbed the back of Chikadze’s head after the jab — stifling any return, staying close, worsening Chikadze’s posture, and forcing Chikadze to work to escape such an annoying predicament.
What Kattar did build off, often, was Chikadze’s consistent ducking — drawing it out and coming up the middle, or countering with the uppercut mid-exchange as Chikadze looked to dart in and duck out. Later in the fight, Kattar replaced the upward-arcing strikes by just aiming his rear hand a bit lower, catching Chikadze on the side of the head from range as he lowered his level. Normally, Chikadze’s range and his movement would keep his shoddy reactions in the pocket less relevant — but again note the distance-closing dynamic, of Kattar drawing him out with the jab and tracking his linear and messy exit, or shifting through the feint off the lead leg, all of it compounded by damage and exhaustion by the end of the fight.
Kattar commanding the pocket and muting Chikadze's returns so thoroughly allowed for his most unique improvement to manifest, one that turned the fight into a (quite literal) bloody masterpiece. Since his brutal knockout of Jeremy Stephens via elbow, Kattar had apparently been busy coming up with neat tricks for it — Dan Ige’s eye was a mess due to an elbow off drawing the left hook in the fifth round, and he looked to hold off Max Holloway’s swarm with elbows in close (including one sneaky little diagonal elbow directly out of the high guard) — but the Chikadze fight showed something different than usual. Namely, it showed the advantage of becoming an elbower for a boxer as comfortable and clever in exchanges as Calvin Kattar — that many of the same openings for counters or combinations can be replaced with an ungloved and shorter blow that reliably cuts people to shreds. These advantages were best shown by Australian kickboxer Nathan Corbett, whose elbows were as tactically versatile as anyone’s hands — after boxing his way into a phone-booth fight, Kattar did much of the same.
The sternest single blows of the fight might’ve been Calvin Kattar’s spinning elbows, which consistently stopped Chikadze’s attempts to gain ground on Kattar though blitzes. On Chikadze’s side, his rear hand is usually at best a charging shot — at worst, it’s an ugly one, where his head is far over his feet and he invariably looks to follow up the momentum with his lead hand despite his positioning being destroyed. Kattar could build the elbow off the pull or get behind his lead shoulder (as he often does), using Chikadze’s right as a tactile cue for when Giga would run onto anything in his path.
In this case, the spinning elbow was almost a safer version of the earlier-mentioned left hook for Kattar, the other shot he used to punish Chikadze’s extension on his right; where Chikadze would often try to keep blitzing through the hook (as seen earlier), Kattar’s defense connecting so well to a shot with so much stopping power left it a uniquely viable tool for the Bostonian.
What likely did most of the facial damage was Kattar intercepting or countering with the elbow, walking Chikadze directly onto it. Off the lead hand, Kattar would step in to meet Chikadze as he punched with his elbow projected vertically — similar to how Paul Felder finished Alessandro Ricci, the elbow would both club a fighter on dips (as Chikadze did often) and keep them wary to step in too hard. Chikadze could land his jab and still find himself running into the counter elbow if he wasn’t careful — and this sort of attack connected very well to Kattar’s usual instincts of high-guarding when he saw a threat.
Kattar’s elbow also seamlessly replaced his rear hand in exchange after exchange — as a cross-counter or a slip-counter at extremely close range and as something to punish Chikadze’s reactions (off drawing a counter by hopstepping in or forcing the duck with the jab). Kattar closed the door off the elbow consistently, and even used a leaping rear-elbow on the counter to shift in. One of the very last exchanges showed the utility of the elbow perfectly — Chikadze looks to gain ground with the rear straight several times, and Kattar first exploits the opening with his usual counter 2-3 off the slip, but turns to the elbow the second time and closes the door to the body. It’s the same attack, just with a knife instead of a sword.
Kattar is often maligned as a fighter who isn’t much of a thinker — in terms of strategy, it was certainly true that Kattar was the very best featherweight who wasn’t also one of the most uniquely intelligent fighters in the sport, but Kattar has always been a truly imaginative and adaptable tactician given his fight. The Chikadze fight was a brilliant showcase of that quality, as Kattar put Chikadze through the wringer (and his face through a shredder) with a set of tools that he’d never used with so much flexibility. Kattar/Chikadze wasn’t Kattar’s cleanest performance by any stretch, but it wasn’t meant to be — and as the clean sweep on the scorecards showed, sacrificing a bit of cleanliness and form for doggedness and a focused approach can pay off handsomely.
In Sum
Giga Chikadze’s rise as a contender at 145, while not entirely impressive on his level of competition, was also certainly not without merit (even despite the domineering loss to the #5 contender). Ultimately, in a division where much of the top-7 is largely happy to wait for their moment instead of fighting consistently, it’s very difficult to establish anyone concretely in the 145 pecking order— even if Chikadze gets a few more wins, the landscape of the division makes it a very real possibility that Kattar was the last time he’d fight a top-5 until the current crop ages out entirely. In this sense, activity is the biggest strength of Chikadze in matchmaking, even if it proved his undoing in Las Vegas. That said, he looked like a dangerous and competent fighter against Kattar, even if the fight looked nearly unwinnable in retrospect. The positive side of featherweight struggling to bring promising fighters along is that the ones in the mix are usually going to stay there — for instance, Yair Rodriguez is as relevant as ever despite looking like a bust at the hands of Frankie Edgar, and Chikadze has both schedule and performance on his side in that comparison.
The other bit of misfortune for Chikadze, that said, is that he ran into a true elite talent right when his stock was at its very lowest. Calvin Kattar has had his struggles, none moreso than his last loss to Holloway, but there are very few fighters more interesting to watch work. In a division that arguably contains both of the pound-for-pound top 2, anyone would struggle to look like a worldbeater in comparison — like his teammate Rob Font a weight down, Kattar seems like a fighter with championship potential at one time, who showed up in the UFC a bit too late and maybe took a bit too long to work out what his game needed to be. That’s what makes his last fight so impressive — Kattar was used to winning fights on a mechanical and tactical level, letting his pure skill carry him, but the intentional griminess of his Chikadze fight was a clear direction towards some form of strategic acuity. In contrast to his previous five-round main event win — where Dan Ige’s cleverness repeatedly ran into the brick wall of Kattar’s soundness and efficiency — it was Kattar looking for specific answers here, in a way he hadn’t before.
Kattar developing urgent directionality and the tools to enforce it makes him an even more dangerous proposition for the rest of the division (even if he might not have a great deal of time left in his prime). While he was always poised to do damage against less-developed neutral space fighters like Emmett or Jung, fighters like Rodriguez or Ortega who could previously be expected to pull ugly fights from the Bostonian can no longer be assured that they won’t be his kind of ugly. There’s something unquestionably special about a fighter who can make that sort of adjustment so deep into his career, with so much damage behind him — and if the loss to Holloway defined Calvin Kattar in anyone’s mind, he made sure to start 2022 by proving them to be sorely mistaken.