Break It Down: Calderwood vs. Andrade

On a card dominated by pageantry, one hell of a fight has snuck under the radar. The UK’s most promising female fighter Joanne Calderwood will be facing the biggest test of her career in Jessica Andrade – a Brazilian fireplug with truly scary power.

Andrade, who made a name for herself against much bigger women in the bantamweight division has recently made the cut to 115lbs, absolutely starching Jessica Penne in her strawweight debut. Her savage second round stoppage of the former title challenger sent a message to the rest of the division; she’s coming for that belt and she’s coming fast.

However, there’s one caveat to Andrade’s title hopes – she has to get past Joanne Calderwood. ‘Jojo’ is coming off of undoubtedly the best performance of her career in which she too defeated a former strawweight title challenger in Valerie Letourneau. Calderwood was truly on form that night. She floored and nearly finished her opponent with a spinning back-fist in the first round, almost folded her in half with a jumping front kick, before eventually ending her night with a Tekken-esque combination in the third round, the exclamation point of which was unbelievably yet another perfect spinning back-fist.

When the main card kicks off at UFC 203 we will see a fight between two very different types of strikers. Despite being a former bantamweight, Andrade stands at only 5’2” and has a style comparable to the likes of John Lineker or Wanderlei Silva. She relies on speed, power and pure tenacity during overwhelming bursts of aggression which are designed to cause the opponent to shell up and eventually cave in to the onslaught of punches. Loosely speaking, Calderwood’s style is more analogous to that of Donald Cerrone – a classically trained Muay Thai fighter who uses technique, reach and a dynamic arsenal to find openings and exploit weaknesses wherever they are found. This makes for a very interesting stylistic match up between two formidable strikers.

After much consideration, I think I have a theory about Jojo’s striking style. Calderwood owes her kickboxing skills to her pedigree as an elite level Muay Thai fighter in the UK and Europe, during which she amassed a 19-2 record and earned more than a couple of titles. This is where she developed the amazing skill set which has earned her so much success in MMA, however it is also where she has picked up some bad habits. To understand what I mean, first consider the Muay Thai scoring system. A Thai boxing fight is judged in a much different way to a standard K-1 rules kickboxing bout – to start with, much more credit is given when a kick is landed vs. a punch. This can lead to fighters often standing within each other’s kicking range and simply trying to land more kicks than your opponent, ensuring that you answer each of your opponent’s kicks with a stronger one of your own. In Thailand, offsetting your opponent with strong kicks and knees while absorbing theirs unperturbed is considered a much stronger show of dominance than landing or avoiding a strong punch, so fighting in this manner is a sure-fire way of earning the favour of old-school purist Muay Thai judges in the UK. This is the case even more so with lighter weight female fighters, who are unlikely to get bombed out with a single overhand right counter with large boxing gloves on, so resort to establishing dominance with the other weapons in Muay Thai to get up on the scorecards. In my opinion this is why we sometimes see Jojo absorb way more punches than necessary in her MMA bouts from fighters who are on paper far inferior strikers. She is so confident in her ability to put her hands up, absorb her opponent’s offence and counter with teeps, knees and roundhouse kicks that she may risk going down on the scorecards of an MMA judge.

Obviously Jojo is an experienced MMA fighter surrounded by some of the best coaches in the world and she is surely working diligently to iron out her game wherever she can, but the fact remains that she does get hit. Even in her phenomenal performance against Letourneau, she absorbed a number of right hands and her coach Firaz Zahabi was imploring her to move her head in between rounds. She’d better hope this advice has been fully drilled into her head during this training camp, otherwise she might find one of Andrade’s fists drilled in there instead come Saturday. Andrade truly has power that every woman on the entire UFC roster should be scared of. We all know Joanne is willing to go to war with anybody and certainly isn’t afraid of getting hit, but someone with the skill set she possesses should not be having to take those kind of chances against the likes of Andrade.

We’ll see what prevails on Saturday night in Cleveland, Ohio. Madness, or mastery?