Georges St-Pierre is still regarded as the best welterweight of all time by many memebers of the MMA community. However, the current welterweight champion Kamaru Usman is catching up and could surpass GSP’s records very soon.
Unfortunately, the chances of the fans seeing the two greats clashing in the octagon are very slim. St-Pierre has hung up his gloves after defeating Michael Bisping in 2018, snatching the middleweight gold in the process.
In a recent interview, the Canadian star shared his game plan he would use against Usman:
“Usman has a style where he’s very good at chain wrestling… He can do it all, he’s very well rounded. His main specialty is wrestling, he’s very good at putting opponents against the fence and working from there. ”
“My style, I was more a guy that moves, hit and run, so to speak. That was my game. So my game would have been to put him down, but with fakes and proactive and reactive takedowns. I would have liked, if I would have fought him, to put him on his back because I’ve never seen him there. So that would have been my strategy.”
He further added that the fact Usman never fights off of his back might get transformed into a weak spot he can take advantage of.
“Where someone seems stronger than everybody, that’s where you need to attack because sometimes the strength gets transformed into a weak link. Because you never know how he fights on his back.”
“No one has ever exposed him there. So there are guys that are very good wrestlers, but once they’re on their back they’ve never been there so you don’t know how they’ll react. So because of that, that’s what I would have tried to do in a fight.”
St-Pierre is a good strategist so it’s fun to explore his strategy even though it is purely hypothetical. It’s undoubtedly interesting to imagine how the two aces would fare against each other.