Guida Planned to Keep Gomi Guessing

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Clay Guida knows his UFC 125 win over Takanori Gomi wasn’t especially pretty.

He wasn’t dancing around the cage as much as jerking, jumping, ducking and diving.

“Call it the Funky Chicken if you want or whatever,” Guida said Monday on the Sherdog Radio Network’s “Beatdown” show. “The pattern was just don’t-get-hit-by-Gomi.”

Guida used frenetic movement to set up both strikes and takedowns. Then late in the second round, he submitted the Japanese veteran with a guillotine choke.

“I’ve been feeling a lot better on the balls of my feet and just moving and not leaving -- don’t leave anything to trace,” Guida said. “Don’t leave anything to pattern. Just always be moving this way and that and just kind of ducking. The cool thing is, the good foot movement sets up our punches too. It’s real unorthodox. It’s pretty ugly, but obviously the good exchanges, ones, twos and threes set up our single and double legs.”

The strategy allowed Guida to avoid Gomi’s power and also land some strikes of his own.

“We made it a guessing game,” Guida said. “It looked like it worked. I think the more he thought about it, the more he kind of overthought things. Then he saw we started switching it up from southpaw to orthodox. We played the guessing game with him. We were in, we were out. We landed a couple of good overhands that clipped him. I kicked him in the face a couple of times. The plan was just to be elusive and not be in his range and let him land strikes because the guy can end a fight with one punch. He’s not a guy that we wanted to get in a trading war with. We wanted to keep level changes. We wanted to keep our head movement and open up our wrestling, and that’s what we did.”

After the fight, Guida credited Joe Stevenson for the guillotine that finished Gomi. On “Beatdown” Guida explained that his teammate had given him the confidence to use the submission.

“It’s just one of those moves I’ve never been really successful with,” Guida said. “I’m not super comfortable having a guy on top of me. I’m comfortable on my back, but … I like being on top. My ground-and-pound opens up my submissions on top. I felt like he made a mistake by leaving his neck out there. I took it and I didn’t look back. I was just holding on for dear life.”

Listen to the full interview (beginning at 1:06:00) with Guida.