UFC 165's After-Action Review: Eddie Wineland vs. Renan Barao

It was a little more than a week before his interim title fight at UFC 165 that bantamweight contender Eddie Wineland opened up his playbook to tell us exactly how he planned to deal with the dreaded Renan Barao in Toronto.

Just as in the previous installment of this feature, he did so with assurances from us that we wouldn’t publish any specifics on his game plan until after the fight. And we did so with assurances from him that, win or lose, he’d come back and talk to us about how it went so that we might compare the plan with the execution, and the expectations with reality.

Even though things didn’t go his way in the fight, Wineland proved to be a man of his word. He also proved, at least in the first round of the fight, to be a man who could follow a game plan.

As Wineland told MMAjunkie.com before the bout, the key to success against Barao was to force the interim champ to move backward, and to stop his combos before they start.

“There’s not a whole lot of holes in his game, but he throws a lot of looping punches,” Wineland said. “They come in quantity, so that can be hard to deal with. Sometimes he adds a kick or knee to follow up. I think coming straight down the pipe is the key – not backing up, but forcing him to back up and keeping that pressure on him. I think that will drain his gas tank.”

According to Wineland, he’d spent much of his training camp drilling a few simple responses to shut down Barao’s offense. For instance, when Barao starts throwing punches?

“I’m coming right down the middle right away,” Wineland said. “That first punch or two gets thrown, but if you get hit in the face your combination stops. It makes you stop and think and try to figure out what to do next.”

And if Barao started attacking with the same vicious kicks he’d used against previous opponents?

“You step in and punch him in the face when that happens, right away,” said Wineland. “Look at the [Michael] McDonald fight. McDonald punched him a couple times when he kicked, and then he thought twice about kicking.”

Wineland’s best chance to win, he said, was to press forward, stopping Barao’s offense before it could start, while also keeping the pace high enough to wear the interim champ down. While he may have been fine counter-punching his way to victory over Brad Pickett in his previous fight, Wineland stressed that he didn’t want to let the other guy go first in this one.

“It’s one of those things where you pick him apart, and if and when the opportunity presents itself, you take it,” Wineland said. “I create angles where I’m not out of range. I’m still within punching distance, still in the pocket. But I don’t want to completely counter-punch Barao. I want to press him, lean on him and make him feel a little gassed. I think he’s going to be in good shape, but my conditioning is superior. If it goes to the later rounds, that’s to my advantage.”

In those later rounds, once Barao had tired and slowed down, that’s when his punching power would come into play, Wineland said. His right hand, his left hook, those were his best bets.

As for the ground game, Wineland said he mostly planned to avoid it altogether.

“I think I can outwrestle him, and I think I’m stronger than him,” said Wineland. “But I think when he first tries to clinch with me he’s going to realize how strong I am and he’ll think twice about clinching after that. When that happens, he’ll go back to Plan A.”

If you go back and watch just the first round of the fight, you have to admit that Wineland seemed to be doing exactly what he said he would. He claimed the center of the octagon right away, keeping Barao at bay with feints early on, and firing off punches to stop Barao’s flurries almost as soon as they started. When Barao attempted an early takedown, Wineland shut it down, then clinched the Brazilian up against fence and stalled him there until referee Yves Lavigne stepped in to separate them.

By the end of the first, everything seemed to be going Wineland’s way. He took the round on most people’s scorecards – including all three judges at Air Canada Centre – and his cardio appeared to be holding up just as well as he thought it would.

“I felt great,” Wineland said later of that first round. “I’ll bet my heart rate wasn’t over 120 [beats per minute]. I didn’t even break a sweat. That cliche, ‘I was in the best shape of my life?’ It’s true. I was in the best shape of my life, and by the end of the first I was still breathing through my nose. It’s one of those things where it could have been great, and I got robbed of it.”

It happened early on in the second. Wineland became a little too stationary of a target, forgot about the feints that had halted Barao in the first, and that’s when Barao unfurled the spinning kick aimed directly at his chin. It was almost a carbon copy of the kick he’d attempted in the first round, one that Wineland easily side-stepped.

“I knew he had the spin moves,” Wineland said. “I really wasn’t too concerned about it. You rush someone who throws a spinning kick and it knocks them off-balance. If you notice, in the first round he threw a head kick. I stepped forward and he fell down. That was the game plan the whole time. But it slipped off my chin, hit my collarbone and knocked me down.”

If you watch it live, the kick appears to land flush. It’s only on the replay that you notice how it clipped Wineland’s chin rather than hammering it. As he dropped and then scrambled to escape, Wineland said, he was hurt, but still very clear-headed.

“Had it been a flush kick, straight on, he may have put me out,” Wineland said. “But I’ve had my jaw snapped in half and it didn’t knock me out. The referees in the UFC should know by now. I’ve gotten split from my eye to my forehead and still knocked the guy out. That’s something the referees should know. I’m a tough dude. I can take a shot.”

This time, Wineland felt that he didn’t get the chance. As he struggled to get to one knee, Barao battered him with punches. That’s when Lavigne, the referee, moved in to stop it.

“I don’t care what anybody says,” Wineland said. “I lived it, and I know I wasn’t out. Yeah, he knocked me down. I give him all the credit in the world for that. He got me with a good kick. But man, in a title fight like that? Make sure I’m knocked out, face-down, out cold. That referee took away from me in 30 seconds what I worked 10 years of my life for.”

Of course, Lavigne didn’t have the benefit of a slow-motion replay, nor could he tell what was going on inside Wineland’s head just then. He had to make a split-second decision, and he decided to stop it.

“I was on one knee coming up, and, hey, he may very well have finished me in the next 10 seconds,” Wineland said. “But I may very well have gotten up. You never know. That’s something that I think the fans themselves were robbed of. It could have been a much better fight than it was.”

Back at the hotel, Wineland said, his coach pulled up the video highlights so he could see how the stoppage looked from the outside. “That just confirmed that my feelings were correct,” Wineland said. Not that it mattered then, since the ref’s take was the only one that mattered.

And so Wineland did the only thing he could do. He went home, back to his life, and tried not to brood too much about it. He tried, but he might have failed.

“It’s hard,” Wineland said. “It’s very hard. I’ve worked since April of 2003 to get to that spot. And I’m not going to say I wasn’t hurt, but I wasn’t out. I was knocked down, but not out. You look at right after the fight, I stood up as straight as straight could be. It’s one of those things that puts a real sour taste in my mouth. I wholeheartedly believe that I’m the best 135-pounder in the world. I think in that first round with Renan, I showed that.”

A medical suspension that followed more or less automatically from the TKO finish has kept him out of the fight gym, Wineland said, though he’s doing his best to stay in shape and keep his thoughts positive. He recently bought some property that he may build on soon, he said, and he’s also got a couple car and truck “projects” to work on now that he can return his focus to his life outside of fighting, at least as far as such a thing is even possible.

Because that fight, the one that was Wineland’s big opportunity? It may be over, but it might never be completely finished. Not for him.

“Unfortunately, it’s going to be one of those things where I know I’m going to have to keep revisiting it,” Wineland said. “I know the interviews are soon to come and it’s going to be, ‘Oh, how do you feel?’ Well, I’m pissed off. That’s how I feel about it. It’s part of the game. I’m just trying to get all this sourness, this bitterness out of my head.”

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