Misdirection

As you would have seen from the previous post, I was at Bellator Dublin at the weekend. I noticed in at least a couple of fights that as one fighter would shoot for a take down the other would wrap an arm around the neck and attempt to get a guillotine if not taken down or threaten some sort of submission attempt if taken down. I watched Tyson Fury v Deontay Wilder on Monday and a big part of Fury's plan was to clinch with Wilder and make Wilder carry his weight to tire Wilder. The hold Fury had on Wilder when they clinched was similar to what I saw in the 3 Arena on Saturday night.
There was a lot of hype over Fury getting some MMA training from Darren Till and this training probably served two purposes:
1) Get Fury to be able to handle Wilder in the clinch
2) Misdirection, which got the press hyped up about Fury possibly looking for an MMA fight so that he could train his game plan for Wilder in plain sight with no one really noticing.
It could also have given a false optimism to the Wilder camp that Fury wasn't 100% focused on the rematch.
I notice that the best combat sport fighters can be very good at misdirection, whether intentionally or a handy side effect. Take the recent Conor McGregor v Donald Cerrone UFC fight as an example. Conor was the polar opposite, personality wise, to how he was in the lead up to the Khabib fight. This wasn't intentional misdirection, in my opinion, but did play a part in the real misdirection in my humble opinion. The focus was on bigging up Cowboy's enviable records of most wins under Zuffa, most head kick knockouts etc. Cowboy's coaching team were saying things like Conor only has the left hand, Cowboy has better wrestling and grappling, the longer it goes on the worse Conor's cardio is. The press were lapping this up because they were getting stories out of it.
All the while no one outside of Conor's camp could have anticipated how effective those hard shoulder strikes were in Conor's ruthless 40 second demolition of Cowboy. It isn't just magicians that are masters of misdirection. The best mind game players in combat sports are also great at it.
I tweeted this in a thread recently but felt it would also make a great post for this blog, hence the extra post today.
The thread on twitter can be found here: https://twitter.com/aherneamon/status/1232126525107036160?s=20