Ooi, it's your boy, the not wasting a good pun on this card.

Jack Slack, it's the Jack Slack podcast, and we're coming at you following UFC,

Renya Derrida versus Brendan Allen.

What a mess this card was.

Lots of finishes on the prelims.

Started a good streak.

A couple of interesting performances, but oh my God, did the main card not deliver?

Mainly hindering around the Amon Zahabee, Marlon Vera, non-fight,

and the Mike Malott, Kevin Holland sort of fight,

with an undercurrent of absolutely dreadful reffing throughout the night,

the usual officials, particularly Dan Murgliata, really on one for this card.

I'm going to bang through this in about 10 minutes, I reckon, so I'm not going to bury the lead.

Let's talk about Brendan Allen versus Renier de Ritter. Brendan Allen kind of did what he did to Paul Craig, to be honest. He is a good enough grappler that he can stay safe on top, turn over some nice elbows, and rough people up. But then when he meets people he can't get on top of, he's well-rounded enough that he goes, it's all right, I'll win this from the bottom. And he either rolls into a leg entanglement like he did against Fluffy in their first fight, or he shoots a bad takedown and then pulls into half-guard off the sprawl like he did against him of. And he's not good enough to win fights from the bottom. There are very few people who are.

If you meet another fighter of nearly your level or about the same level, and you end up on the bottom, you're probably going to have a rough time of it.

And that seems to be what he's showing up against people like Renier de Ritter. Renier de Rida ended up on the bottom against him, started trying to throw up arm bars and so on. And Brendan Allen kept his, they used to call it the can opener, but the can opener implies one particular guard opening or guard break. When you're in someone's closed guard and you want to open their legs, you put both hands behind their head, double collar tie, you reach up nice and high on the crown of their head, and you crumple them like a ball into their own sternum.

And it's a neck crank and it forces them to open their legs.

And some people have been submitted by that neck crank, but I think that overshadows the usefulness of the position of having both hands behind the opponent's head.

Because if he wants to do anything, he has to walk his hips out away from you, And if you've got both hands behind his head, you can just pull his hips in. You can always turn over the elbow. And you'll know where their head is because you'll have one hand on their head. So you just have to elbow to your hand. And if they do swing their hips out for an arm bar, like Derrida was doing the sort of arm bar that Diego Lopez often throws up, where he really throws his hips out to the side and he leans his head in towards one of your knees. And if they do that, you don't have to pull them into the center of their chest anymore. You just pull their head into their knee and you can start elbowing them while they're stuck in that position. Because if you've got your elbows in nice and tight, very hard for them to actually accomplish an arm bump on you in that way.

Now it requires a good deal of sensitivity and strength and it's not that easy, but if you watch

someone like George Saint-Pierre, he had magnificent success from this position. Greg Jackson calls

it goalposts

when you got both forearms down their collarbones and your hands behind their head. John Jones

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