Madden: That’s it, man; 100 percent.
So when we talk about this fight, the longer the fight goes, the more it favors Max in my opinion, and the shorter the fight goes, the more chaos there is in the first two rounds, the more it favors Charles.
When we go back and look at the fight with Max and Ilia (Topuria), before Max got knocked out, Ilia took him down against the fence. The way I look at the fence in MMA now is that it’s a death trap, largely; there are some people that can operate well on the fence, but there are a lot of people that still don’t understand their distance from the fence, where it is, how to get away from it.
Kyte: It just stops you, limits you so much.
Madden: You’re fighting in an alley now, and the odds for the other person go up now, especially for someone that is an agent of chaos like Charles Oliveira. He has exchanges there, his clinch ability there, and the takedown is there too, and I trust Charles will probably be the bigger guy on fight night and he’ll probably use that strength to his advantage.
Charles needs to cut the cage, and he needs to start this fight with chaos right off the bat, not allow Max to dictate the range and the tempo in the first two rounds. If that happens, I favor Charles.
For Max, the longer the fight goes, the better it is for him. I say it a lot that fighting in the middle of the cage, fighting downhill, is way better than fighting uphill, which is your back against the fence. The longer the fight goes, the bigger the cage gets for Max — the more space he has, the more he can move his feet.
