Alex Pereira successfully defended his light heavyweight championship at UFC 303 on Saturday night, and a clip that was shared on social media helped him formulate a strategy for the fight.
Pereira knocked out former UFC light heavyweight champion Jiri Prochazka with a kick to the head early in the second round. It looked like Prochazka never saw the kick coming:
These angles of Pereira head kick 🥶 pic.twitter.com/bhOSHzYgki
— Home of Fight (@Home_of_Fight) June 30, 2024
Had it not been for a warmup video of Prochazka that surfaced on Instagram before the fight, Pereira might have never attempted the head kick. Pereira revealed in his post-fight press conference that his coach, Plinio Cruz, showed him a video in the locker room of Prochazka practicing his calf kick counters. Pereira noticed that Jiri has a bad habit of dropping his hands when defending kicks.
“I noticed that he was doing the wrong timing, and his timing wasn’t good — I saw he was too focused on avoiding the calf kick, so he was leaving his hands down and leaving the head exposed,” Pereira said, via Tom Llewellyn of Bloody Elbow. “So, I told (Cruz), I’m going to explore the high kick.”
Cruz also confirmed in an interview that the strategy stemmed from the video of Prochazka.
“Yeah man, be careful what you post before your fights, alright?” Cruz said. “We were browsing on Instagram and I saw somebody posted a video of us dancing, on the warmup … the way he was doing what he assumed was the correct block for the calf kicks was wrong. I showed that to Alex and he said, ‘Let me see that video again.’ He goes, ‘When he’s doing this, he’s putting his hands down. I’m gonna kick this guy in the head.’”
Alex Pereira saw this video on social media in his changing room and noticed Jiri drops his hands after every calf kick check and decided to add the head kick to the game plan
CRAZY https://t.co/Rg8Md8Xd49 pic.twitter.com/oUrRIEzwGU
— OOC MMA (@oocmma) June 30, 2024
It is certainly possible that Pereira would have won the fight anyway, but it sounds like Prochazka made life much easier for the light heavyweight champ than it had to be.
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