While the Karate expert and current UFC light heavyweight champion, Lyoto Machida likens striking to chess, Brandon Vera sees it slightly differently. The Muay Thai fighter compares striking to ballet:

I enjoy standing. A lot of UFC fans love to see a standup fight, and standup is beautiful. When people [strike] right, it looks like ballet. Any time you get two guys that know what they're doing, and they do beautiful standup together, it's like ballet.

While Brandon Vera defeated Krzyzstof Soszynski decisively, he admittedly doesn't think that it looked much like ballet just yet. A reason for this, was because he was trying to perfect a new part of his game - Fighting in southpaw:

It was I guess trying to fight southpaw. Being in a southpaw stance, making it happen from that stance, imagine learning to fight in six weeks. When we found out we were fighting Krzysztof, we decided, '[Expletive] it; let's fight him southpaw.' I'm not worried about him coming after me. I'm not worried about him taking me down. I'm not worried about anything. Let's fight him southpaw, and let's see what happens.

There isn't a better opponent to try it against then Krzysztof. He's durable. He's tough. He's going to keep coming forward. With everybody you have to worry about getting knocked out, but I wouldn't have tried that [expletive] on Anderson Silva. So it worked, and it didn't work at the same time. I landed some beautiful combinations, some good stuff. I tried some new things.

Brandon Vera is right when he said that it worked and didn't work at the same time. At some parts of the fight, he looked fluid, technical, and very hard to hit, but at times, he looked a bit tentative and gun shy. It may not be his best performance to date, but it was a fight where he showed lots of improvement on other facets of his game.

If a more improved skillset is what he needs to live up to his potential, and turn into a beautiful balerina of destruction, then I'm all for it.

HT: MMA Junkie

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