Sylvie Fight #292 - 47 kg vs 54 kg | mixing in hands more, experimenting with style

[Kevin writing, Sylvie's excellent commentary video above]

As Sylvie approaches 300 Muay Thai fights in total we're sharing her commentary videos of recent fights, along with my thoughts as an informed ring-side observer, so you can see into the fight. This particular commentary and fight gives great insight into traditional rules narrative scoring, one of the most difficult aspects of trad Muay Thai to understand. Nobody gives fight commentary like Sylvie, and my thoughts below are marginal.

This was something of a odd fight all around. The opponent very experienced in the Hua Hin scene was a short notice replacement, though quite worthy, and Sylvie had been undergoing a somewhat harsh full rabies vaccine regime (I believe it was 4 shots over a month?) which had taken a fair amount out of her in the lead up. Add to this, Sylvie had been working a lot on her boxing with Chatchai and in the gym - to my surprise - pretty much fought this fight as a boxing fight in terms of spacing and pocket pressure. Maybe she did this because those were the rhythms she had been training, and maybe she did that instinctively because she didn’t feel strong due to the rabies treatment, but she definitely was fighting this fight differently than her usual approaches. It was fairly low key, fairly in-and-out with little attempt to impose her Muay Khao advantage in the narrative. Add to that, it seemed very clear that her opponent Limping, likely knowing about Sylvie’s reputation, smartly made it her aim to just keep Sylvie away from her strength - and approach of nullification - so it was a curious combination of Sylvie veering away from her strength as an experiment, which also coincided with the opponent strategizing the same, do not clinch me.

Watching the fight I was pretty worried in the first few rounds because she just wasn’t imposing herself on the pocket. There is a sort of invisible bubble between two fighters, and the way that Sylvie works her magic, usually as a much smaller fighter, is that she starts pressuring the bubble early, because of what that does in narrative scoring later. You start writing checks that you are going to cash later, as Sylvie likes to say. In this case she wasn’t really trying to write those checks at all, but instead seemed to be lightly sniping with some boxing, because that’s what she’s been working on, happy to stay outside. Her choice though was making her opponent’s stay-away, boxing-like style look better than it would have…I was thinking.

She mentions in commentary that I always want her to clinch in the first two rounds. A little on that because its interesting. Yes, clinching early starts to drain the battery of your opponent, but there are much more important reasons why as a Muay Khao fighter you want to do this. The greatest of these is that in today’s Muay Thai you may run into a ref who by character is going to break the clinch fast. It’s a big strategic error to leave your clinch game for only the scoring rounds of 3 or 4, because if you have that kind of ref he can all by himself defeat you with quick breaks. By the time you adjust it’s already the 5th round and the fight is ostensibly over. So, in today’s Entertainment influenced Muay Thai, you have to start clinching early, because you want that kind of a ref breaking the clinch early, in rounds that score much. If you are insistant, by the time you get to the 3rd and 4th rounds even the most anti-clinch ref will usually loosen up, and give you windows where you can turn the fight. You’ve created a narrative, and he’ll often work with you a bit, if you start telling the story early. Start telling that story late, and he may not let you. The second reason you need to clinch early as a Muay Khao fighter is that fighters these days only have 1 or maybe 2 counter-clinch moves, and you want to find out their main counter-clinch vocabulary early, when the scoring doesn’t matter so much. This allows you time to solve their solve. If you wait until the 4th round you may run into a counter that in that short window is just too hard to adjust too. Maybe a tall fighter who cross-faces or a particular style of the Wall of China. Again, by the time you’ve figured it, its the 5th round. This is part of the larger philosophy of Muay Khao that we’ve learned through hundreds of fights, and some of this is that before even Entertainment Muay Thai took hold post-COVID, Sylvie regularly would face pretty fast clinch-breaks because of her reputation. Key is…clinch early, even if its just a little bit.

It’s enough to say, Sylvie was exploring different stylistics in this fight, and it’s a good thing. She’s fought so many fights - 300 now - you would think that you’d have so much opportunity to try on tactics and styles, but each and every fight that’s before you suddenly has its own pressure. She’s almost always facing size so you have to physically protect yourself, which means you better stay close so you're not in whacking range, and the call of the fight, what it takes to win, carries its own immediate imperative. A lot of Sylvie's fairly closed style has been shaped by this continuous pressure. In this fight Sylvie was actually able to explore and experiment, and her deep experience in narrative fighting, along with some sharpening boxing, allowed her to open up a lead in rounds 3 and 4, and manage the fight to its finish. Which is impressive, because she wasn’t in her comfort zone.

Generally though, the bounce-outs create difficulties because, especially as the physically smaller fighter, every time you bounce out to breathe, your opponent is resting, and you are defending yourself with distance, which means that you are putting yourself closer to your opponent’s range and less so for yourself. You have to pass through “pad work range” (where you don't want to be) to strike, which isn’t great as a smaller fighter. This can have significant safety consequences, which I as her husband am very attuned to. Sylvie has only suffered 1 knockdown in her last 1,100+ rounds, in part because she refuses to stand at range ver often. She's never counted, she never goes down. Addition to safety, stylistically defending yourself with distance also allows your opponent much more freedom in determining tempo, which means they can dictate narrative more readily. Additionally, as the smaller fighter its difficult to create a visual impact on your opponent, so even if you are landing more, they can easily wear your strikes, and in traditional scoring this can sometimes go against you. This is part of a reason why some great very small fighters like Hippy, who was technically as beautiful as you can imagine, just couldn’t fight very far up, because the visual is difficult to overcome. It’s not just a question of “power”, its how the fight appears. You have to as a smaller fighter look like you are imposing yourself on the fight, which takes something of illusion creation. In this fight it worked - as Sylvie pointed out - her opponent’s footwork and retreat started to melt a little from the comfortably crispness of the early rounds, and these changes register. And, Sylvie was able to land more and get a few dominant clinch positions which bent rounds towards her, even though she was seldom really fully pressuring for clinch. With experience, she worked the fight to victory. It's important not to minimize just how hard it is to consistently fight UP, multiple weight classes, as Sylvie does. Even a fight like this poses dangers and hidden difficulties. Weight matters in the fight game, and Sylvie is rare in her ability to overcome it.

Also, as a bit of background insight, for this fight she had started to radically change her training. She was in a hybrid state where she was mixing some of her old padwork and running routes with the new Mavinn Pattaya gym, but really hadn’t found a new pattern she needed, and she’s a fighter who is very dependent on consistency. The mix of boxing, and the rabies vaccine taking away her endurance, made this whole fight something of a phase-shifting fight, and its kind of cool in that way. Her short-notice opponent's strategy was great as well, as she bid to control the tempo and distance in a skilled way, but some fatigue set in and it couldn't hold.

Sylvie's complete, up to date Fight Record here

A Playlist of all of Sylvie's Fights here

Fight 292 - Sylvie (47 kg) vs Linping Pumpantung (54 kg) with Commentary (YouTube)