UFC 164's After-Action Review: Josh Barnett vs. Frank Mir

Back in July, we got the chance to do something a little different from the usual pre-fight routine when Tim Kennedy agreed to talk openly and honestly about his game plan and expectations going into a fight with Roger Gracie.

He agreed to that under the condition that we wouldn’t publish it until after the fight, when such information would no longer be of any use to his opponent. We agreed to it under the condition that he’d give us the kind of specifics fighters usually go out of their way to conceal before a bout, and also sit down with us afterward – win or lose – to compare his expectations with reality.

It was interesting, at least for me, since fighters usually keep their game plans so close to the vest that it’s sometimes hard to tell, just by looking at the fight, what the plan was in the first place. Spotting the difference between a flawed strategy and a failed execution can be tough, especially if you don’t know what the fighter was going for in the first place.

So, we figured, why not try to make a habit of this, if only for our own education? And why not steal Kennedy’s military phrase – the AAR, or After-Action Review – as a headline?

For our first installment, we reached out to UFC heavyweight Josh Barnett, who agreed to open up his own personal playbook and scouting report before his bout with Frank Mir at UFC 164, which took place this past Saturday as the co-main event at Milwaukee’s Bradley Center.

“The basic plan is to put the hurt on him, from start to finish,” Barnett told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) in a phone conversation a couple days before fight. “Get in his face, push the cardio.”

As it turns out, the whole getting in Mir’s face part was actually pretty integral to Barnett’s overall strategy.

“Frank’s striking has been highly dependent on distance,” Barnett said. “Inside, he’s not super active. But from a distance, that’s when he throws high kicks and flurries and such. He moves forward and back a lot. If I allow him to move forward, he can generate offense. If he gets stuck going backward, not so much.”

That wasn’t the only tendency Barnett had zeroed in on, either.

“He always throws a right hook counter to the right hand,” Barnett said. “He often leans to his left with a slight fade back to try and use his height and his reach to just paw at people. They’re not pitter-pat punches, but it’s what I’m counting on contributing to his downfall is him leaning into a right hand or a high kick or something. Also, his feet are often planted. So if he does throw a right hook counter, I’ll throw the first right hand up high, catch the counter on my guard, then do a little skip step through and land with another right hand that’s longer. He’ll be sitting on his heels, swiping at me with his head back, and I should be able to land flush on his chin. I don’t necessarily expect him to go down immediately with any one big shot that I hit him with, but I know that he is susceptible to being knocked out. Once you hurt him, you just pour the heat on him and he’s done.”

And where did Barnett envision himself pouring on this heat? If you guessed the clinch, go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back.

“He’s shown he’s not good in the clinch,” Barnett said. “He has a hard time with wrestlers. He doesn’t pummel all that well. He’s prone to feeling like, ‘Oh, I’m losing. I should try and make something happen.’ Like he threw a jumping knee at Lesnar and fell down, and that was the beginning of the end, really. While I don’t plan to give him many opportunities, I know that I’m the better wrestler, and when his back is up against the cage he doesn’t have much offense. He’s been knocked out there before, like with Carwin. I don’t know how much work against the cage we’re going to have, but I know it’s a spot I can put him in and maybe reduce some of his stamina.”

Wearing Mir down was also a central part of Barnett’s plan. Because he believed himself to be in better shape and also in possession of a better wrestling game, he had supreme confidence that it would be Mir who tired first. As for Mir’s ability to pull out a submission when things looked bleak?

“He submitted Brock that one time, kind of a Hail Mary deal,” Barnett said. “The second time, no way. Didn’t even come close. Once his initial attack starts to fail, he will get tired. I just don’t sweat his submission game.”

If all this sounds shockingly prescient to you, considering how the fight went, you aren’t alone. Barnett did exactly what he said he’d do, only faster. Within seconds of the start of the fight, he had Mir on the defensive and moving backward. Soon he’d closed the distance, nullifying Mir’s best striking tools as Barnett trapped him in the clinch against the fence.

“I immediately came out of the gates swinging, and that’s how we ended up in a clinch,” Barnett told me two days after the fight. “Even when there were opportunities for him, when distance was created, I just kept throwing big kill-shots at him because that way, if you don’t hit something, the likelihood of ending up in a clinch is high anyway.”

And while you might think that a fight which lasted less than two minutes wouldn’t have given Barnett a chance to test his theory on Mir’s cardio, you’d be wrong, he said.

“To be honest, I think I took a lot of the wind out of his sails with knees to the body in the clinch,” Barnett said. “That made my job much easier. Pounding those knees into the midsection, I knew they had won me the fight. If he had cardio, I don’t know how much of it would have been usable after taking some of those. I think a few lifted him off his feet.”

Barnett’s clinch game has been years in the making, he said. It’s something he began working on with trainer Matt Hume, and has since expanded with the influences of Greco-Roman wrestling, Muay Thai kickboxing, and what longtime friend and trainer Erik Paulson likes to call “hockey punching.” Putting it all together against Mir gave him just the opening he was looking for.

“I had smelled blood earlier, and I changed grips, threw the forearm on the neck standing up, which is actually quite an effective technique when you’re mounted on somebody,” Barnett said. “It’s the old forearm-in-the-windpipe, so they have to react, push the forearm, do something. You create movement, plus you’re limiting their ability to intake oxygen. Up against the fence, it stood him right up. He didn’t want his head up in the air like that so he turned his head, turned his chin, and I just followed right into it.”

That’s when Barnett landed the knee to the head that dropped Mir to the canvas. It’s also when referee Rob Hinds decided he’d seen enough, and moved in to stop the bout, much to the dismay of Mir and many of the fans watching. Had Hinds not done that, Barnett said, “I was about to go absolutely berserk.”

After the fight, much of the talk focused on the stoppage. Was it too early? Could Mir have made a comeback? Did it deny him his chance to mount an intelligent defense? At the post-fight press conference, Mir offered an explanation of the end of the bout that Barnett found a little odd.

“I am curious about this new technique that Frank was going to employ against me, the fall to the floor takedown attempt,” Barnett said. “I don’t know. It’s weird. You hear stuff like that and you want to comment, but you don’t. There’s no point. He said he was just waiting for his moment to strike that entire time. That seems like a rough way to go about fighting people, but what do I know?”

As for how it felt to be back in the UFC after all these years, and with another win over a top heavyweight to show for it?

“I just felt meaner,” Barnett said. “That’s all. I felt meaner and more berserk.”