Strikeforce ‘Nashville’ Preview

Strikeforce Lightweight Championship
Gilbert Melendez vs. Shinya Aoki

The Breakdown: As soon as Frankie Edgar and Douglas Crosby put an end to B.J. Penn’s UFC lightweight title reign, the bout between Aoki and Melendez took on a whole new significance. Melendez’s Strikeforce lightweight strap may not be the only prize on the line, as the winner could become the world’s top fighter at 155 pounds.

The battle for lightweight supremacy hinges almost entirely on Melendez’s chances of keeping his limbs and airways far away from Aoki’s sadistic submissions. An entirely unique grappler in modern MMA, Aoki’s game employs a wide variety of advanced and unconventional techniques with which opponents are simply unaccustomed to dealing. A fine example of that was his technical submission win over Mizuto Hirota via hammerlock, a technique that requires the grip strength of a gorilla to employ in the arm-breaking fashion Aoki so easily did.

For all of Aoki’s preternatural ability on the mat, his striking remains almost comically inept, and he has a well-known distaste for punishment in a sport that regularly eats the timid alive. That plays into Melendez’s style, as his tremendous work rate and newfound love for the jab make him ideally suited to outwork Aoki from afar -- a range where all of Aoki’s foibles are on full display.

The problem for Melendez maintaining that strategy is twofold. Knockout power is not a weapon in his arsenal, and while it does not take a tactical nuke to get Aoki looking for a way out, the longer it takes Melendez to hurt Aoki, the more time the Japanese star has to get this fight on the mat. Melendez will enter the cage as the better wrestler of the two by a fair margin, but Aoki’s ability to crowd opponents and force fights to the mat has been vastly underrated. Throughout his career, Aoki has managed to get fights on the floor by relying on his ability to effectively pull guard and create scrambles.

That leads to where Melendez will have to break a career-long habit. Whenever someone has tried to take him down, his response has been to counter by reversing into top control. That represents a one-man suicide pact in a fight with Aoki, as Melendez lacks the level of grappling necessary to contain him on the mat. Keeping Aoki upright long enough to lay him out or ride out the closing bell seems like an obvious strategy, but executing it will take the discipline of a monk, and Melendez has never looked like he can rock a proper Friar Tuck cloak.

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The Bottom Line: Aoki has been the source of great debate in the MMA community, and it’s hard not to knock on a guy who acts like a trauma victim whenever he gets fouled. A soccer player’s flair for the dramatic will not do Aoki any favors in this fight, but Melendez’s willingness to enter into scrambles will ultimately doom him. The man in the rainbow-colored pants snatches another submission and, with it, lightweight supremacy.