Uno Anjos: A Look At Beneil Dariush
The UFC’s 155 pound division is certainly in the running as one of the deeper divisions in MMA, even discounting the top-talent tied up in other promotions (such as ACA), but it stands even further away from the field in terms of raw danger; while a division like featherweight might be slightly more rigorous in terms of entrance to the top-10, a low-firepower technician like Renato Moicano would be a massive anomaly as an elite presence in today’s lightweight. That sort of fighter isn’t far from the top of 155 in terms of skill, but while Moicano might be more equipped technically than someone like Paul Felder, the chances of him surviving a bout like Felder/Barboza 2 are drastically lower; similar to middleweight, the elite-tier of lightweight is defined just as much by overwhelming athleticism as it is by skill, and those with realistic aspirations to reach the top require both in massive measure.
This situation has created a tier of terrific fighters who are never in position to get their due, as they might not even ever enter the top-10; the public generally gauges the value of a win by the ranking of the loser, but a division like lightweight skews that considerably, as beating an unranked-155er like Bobby Green or David Teymur is at least as difficult as some ranked wins at weaker divisions. They're just of zero value to the public, purely because lightweight is uniquely unforgiving enough to keep them on the fringes.
Beneil Dariush isn’t just one of those fighters, but a man who has built a legacy (among keener followers of the sport, at least) beating that sort of fighter; some of his wins have appreciated and become more than what they were, but for the most part, Dariush has constructed a list of Ws where the difficulty far outpaced the name value.
This can seem like a bit of a backhanded compliment, a slightly softer way to frame having a clear ceiling, but in Dariush's case, it should be interpreted as the opposite; he was never in position to be an athletic powerhouse, but has become a fighter so genuinely great that he almost reached actual contention in a division where that's almost impossible. A number of lightweights (all differently-skilled and many with a higher athletic ceiling) simply couldn't deal with the wily southpaw, even if he was insurmountably outgunned at points. Dariush has essentially built the quietest all-timer resume to ever exist, right under everyone's noses, with his skills and wits his only aid.
A King of Kings
From the beginning of his UFC career, Dariush was aligned with Kings MMA, and his delevopment from-the-ground-up at that camp has been very clear; Rafael Cordeiro tends to create a fairly particular sort of striker out of grapplers, and Beneil checks most of those boxes. Dariush's essential process was most clear in his short bout against James Vick; while Vick went on a steep decline after his short time in the sun as a contender (including a win over the great Francisco Trinaldo), Dariush was the one who took his professional 0, and the way he did it couldn't have been more evocative of the classical Cordeiro model.
Despite the unique proportions of the Lloyd Irvin product, Dariush’s essential process against Vick was the same as it ever has been; from the beginning of the fight, Dariush looked to push Vick back and cut off his exits to encourage him to walk into the rear-kick. Working with his longest weapons against the ganglier man and staying out of jabbing range otherwise, Dariush kept Vick from being able to grasp his distancing while also pushing forward.
Forcing Vick backwards was advantageous in that it forced engagement out of him, and Vick had no way to engage in close range without running into issues from the tighter boxer. Dariush could pull and counter in combination (to cover the distance as Vick hurried back) as Vick went for the classic long-man uppercut, or just beat Vick up when he tried to kick on the backfoot to keep him off.
Dariush’s strong counterpunching came in handy against a fighter like Vick, who had nothing in the way of proactive defense and relied (at this point in his career, at least) on running into his opponent with flurries for meaningful boxing offense. Dariush hurt him badly twice on the counter, once directly off blocking a kick and a second time as Vick squared up to shift off a big right hand (which not only gave Dariush the easy inside-slip and left hand, but left Vick in awful position to take it), and just didn’t let him off the hook.
Vick wasn’t a tremendously valuable win, especially before he really developed the jab that made him a viable long-man and not just a fragile long-man playing a short-man game; that said, the fight did show the core of Dariush’s skillset, and Vick was a professionally undefeated prospect at the time. While a worse athlete and a less comfortable boxer, the dos Anjos comparisons are very defensible from this performance alone; Dariush can fight ferociously and (fairly) soundly from every range and in every phase, has a defined process to force his opponent backwards and herd them into his southpaw rear-kick and rear-hand, and can effectively punish efforts to back him off. He also had the promotional downside of dos Anjos, a sort of detached stoicism that only serves to hurt someone in the bombastic world of combat sports; being the consummate professional, he remained more of a cult-favorite than an even slightly-mainstream name, as he put on no pretenses outside of fighting.
Of course, most of Dariush’s other fights were more challenging than James Vick (perhaps only excepting his debut against Charlie Brenneman and a fight with Frank Camacho revisited later), and his most impressive performances are against current dark-horses who don’t get their due as fighters nor as wins. For example, Rashid Magomedov was a low-volume counterpuncher who was never going to be prominently featured by the UFC, but he was a genuinely promising fighter who was off a win over (the currently surging welterweight) Gilbert Burns. The fight took place appropriately on Rafael dos Anjos’ undercard in Mexico City, and Dariush later said that he felt his heart was going to give out under the exertion at altitude; it was a credit to his coaching and his discipline that he stayed in the fight, while also playing havoc with the reads of one of the most adept strikers that no one has ever heard of.
While Kings fighters can often get away with aggression if all else fails (see Werdum, F.), that was not a viable option against Magomedov. Dariush came out patiently cutting off the cage; taking small steps to try to get outside Magomedov’s lead-foot (the classic open-stance battle), jabbing to get Magomedov circling into his rear hand, and trying to right-hook him if he moved the other way, but also not getting overzealous and letting Magomedov off the fence with a big linear movement. Also in this sequence is another Cordeiro-staple, the double collar tie; Dariush isn’t a terrific clincher, but he has that in his toolbox to get some damage off and create space if his opponent has him pressed against the fence.
It was not a high-paced fight, but Magomedov’s threat on the counter forced Dariush to show how he could both disguise and build off his offense. Magomedov is a more talented counterpuncher than Tyron Woodley, but Dariush didn’t allow him to look like it early; the southpaw jab/feint, mixing up the target of the rear kick, punching off kicks, and even the superman punch off the rear-kick feint all made timing Dariush on that night a daunting task for anyone.
Round 2 was some of the same, some of Dariush resting in the clinch, but also Dariush building on what he found in round 1. He could draw out Magomedov’s defensive reactions or counters with the jab and punish them with the rear hand a few times (although he didn’t push it for obvious reasons), and he committed to counter-kicking Magomedov. Dariush wasn’t hard to kick, but he was hard to kick for free, and it kept Magomedov from recovering from the volume deficit in round 1.
Dariush looked to keep the same thing going in round 3, but as his counters grew wider and more labored, Magomedov found his moments; he could kick and get away more cleanly as Dariush no longer had the crispness he did in round 1, or draw out Dariush’s counters and punish them (for example, using the front-kick to draw out the leg kick and checking to counter with the 1-2, and then ducking the counter-left of Dariush to land a left hook of his own). Dariush turned to the double-collar tie even more enthusiastically in round 3, linking those entries with his counters, and Magomedov’s inability to stay away or get out of the DCT quickly likely lost him the fight.
Magomedov is still a phenomenal win in retrospect; Dariush was the only man to beat him in the UFC, and he went on to deserve to win the 2018 PFL Lightweight Tournament (although he came out on the wrong end of an awful robbery against Natan Schulte). One could even go so far as to consider him one of the best strikers in the division at the time, and Dariush simply outsmarted him and survived late. Kings is a strong camp for grapplers-turned-fighters, but it has largely hinged on Cordeiro instilling a willingness to go into the fire at whatever cost; the cooler and more thoughtful Dariush provided an interesting contrast to that, even with a similar toolset (the southpaw rear-kick and the double collar tie). When he needed to bite down and get after it, though, he did; the aforementioned fight against Vick showed Dariush against an opponent he’d need to push a pace on, and he was relentless. A tactical switch like that is quite rare.
The previous fights showed Dariush in the front-foot role, and that’s where the dos Anjos comparison really comes to bear; that said, Dariush (like dos Anjos) has shown a functional backfoot game, although it hasn’t been tested by a strong pressure fighter in his case. Dariush’s most recent fight was something of a blank slate in that sense; while Frank Camacho was improving, slaughtering Nick Hein’s body in his last bout, it was one that was meant to see if Dariush’s massive skill advantage could overcome the big edge in toughness and willingness to exchange that Camacho brought. What resulted was the cleanest fight of Dariush’s career, but one he fought while drawing the Guamanian into him; Dariush didn’t push Camacho into the fence, rather allowing Camacho to take the lead-foot and schooling him regardless.
Dariush consistently circled into the open-side in the southpaw-orthodox matchup, and Camacho didn’t really have a real way to pressure other than “move forward”; this gave Dariush free license to move, and also to pelt Camacho with kicks for free as Camacho followed him around and was turned constantly. Dariush used that to play the standard southpaw-game; he could actually fake the kick to jump into the superman punch as he did early (kind of an inverted version of GSP’s inside-leg-kick/superman-punch changeup) or just take advantage of both the straight and the kick looking similar to start by cracking Camacho down the center as Camacho braced for the kick.
As easy as Dariush made it look, Camacho was a threat to him in at least one range; Dariush has never been the most durable fighter, and Camacho turning it into a hockey-fight on the inside would’ve tilted the fight more in his favor. Dariush mitigated this risk by actively clinching off kicks; the collar-tie could obstruct a punch coming around the side as he recovered his balance, and he could use that to do further work (such as how he dug the underhook and turned Camacho in the second instance, and broke with two left hands before Camacho could do anything out of the clinch himself). While the Kings DCT is generally just another offensive tool for someone like Werdum, Dariush used it defensively here to perfection.
This sort of thing is a good sign of a striker who at least has good ideas; Dariush threw a rear-hand uppercut just to draw Camacho’s counter, which he proactively ducked under as he shifted to orthodox and landed a hook from his now lead-hand. The body kick in this clip is the only strike Camacho landed in the entire fight.
The fight ended after about a minute of styling from Dariush in which he read Camacho like a book; here, the feint drew out Camacho’s slip and parry as he expected the straight-left again, and Dariush just used that to cover his takedown entry. The finish came soon afterwards with an RNC that looked through the jaw, just as a reminder that (as crafty as Dariush has looked as a striker) he’s a grappler at heart.
Even with Dariush’s formidable skillset established numerous times, among wild danger-men and polished technicians alike, the source of his troubles is no secret in a division as brutal as 155. While a fighter like Edson Barboza can afford a few technical flaws (even otherwise-fatal ones) and remain in high esteem, Dariush’s issue is one that can render even the inordinate craft that he’s shown at every step useless.
The Longest Back In The West
Beneil Dariush’s viability as a top-15 fighter and (at one time, at least) a borderline-elite presence is in direct contradiction to everything about the man’s attributes; one could reasonably venture to say that Dariush is the worst athlete to ever have real staying power in the top-20 of a good division. He isn’t a real puncher, he isn’t particularly fast nor explosive, his survivability is much more a function of heart than of chin, and he isn’t even particularly well-conditioned (as seen in his fight against Evan Dunham, where he gassed out while beating his head in); these are limitations that Dariush has worked around, but they have a way of popping up at a certain level of competition. Even when Dariush proves to be the smarter and more consistently-skilled striker (as he did against Edson Barboza) or when his opponent brings nothing to the table but aggression and explosion (as Alexander Hernandez did), the margin of error for Dariush can end up failing him.
One of the better examples is his recent fight with Drew Dober, a fighter who has turned into a truly scary prospect for the division; Dober has become a ferocious burst-puncher in his recent outings (a stretch which included his fight with Dariush), as he went from losing to middling fighters like Olivier Aubin-Mercier to sparking the fearsome Nasrat Haqparast clean out. Dariush entered the bout a decent favorite, but it ended up one of the hardest fights of his career; considering his knockout losses that were uncomfortably recent at the time, Dariush even surviving the onslaught was incredible. He survived and went on to win, but it was nevertheless a concerning showing.
It wasn’t totally catastrophic on the feet for Dariush, particularly when he could keep it to shorter exchanges; he had success jabbing in the closed-stance, spearing Dober to keep him away, and Dariush could find his usual counters and exit/close distance on his terms if Dober got too confident in his edge in exchanges.
That said, the meaningful blows of round 1 were all landed by Dober; Dariush struggled against another southpaw who wouldn’t let exchanges end easily, as Dober could build flurries off cross-counters and generally overload Dariush’s defense. As before, Dariush’s safe-haven was the clinch, which he grabbed with regularity as he navigated Dober’s aggression.
What saved Dariush was just sheer tenacity; the athleticism difference gave Beneil fits in trying to wrestle through round 1, but he reacted quickly to Dober abandoning the underhook by switching to a double on the fence. He controlled the rest of the round, and finished it with a triangle-armbar.
The fact that his athletic deficiencies have come back to haunt Dariush shouldn’t be a cause for reducing his standing as a terrifically skilled lightweight; if anything, the fact that they don’t pop up more often should be cause for praise. That said, while there are winnable matchups for Dariush in the top-10 (and even one in the top-5 in Donald Cerrone), Dariush’s stumbling block is one that isn’t likely to be crossed. It’s simply the nature of 155, even at the unranked level (for example, Dariush’s struggles to deal with Thiago Moises on the feet).
Concluding Thoughts
As impressive as the wins already shown are, they still don’t fully capture the depth of Dariush’s resume over the talent of the future; for example, his submission of current welterweight dark-horse Tony Martin, or his win over the nascent but then-undefeated Carlos Diego Ferrieira. Dariush also holds a win over the gritty veteran Jim Miller, and managed to get an official (if somewhat illegitimate) win over the dangerous Michael Johnson in the best form of a career that included a top-5 stint. If any fight is fit to summarize Dariush from a narrative perspective (as opposed to a technical one), MJ is that; outgunned and outslicked, Dariush found a way.
There is no fighter as philosophically opposed to Beneil Dariush as Michael Johnson, and this fight featured a genuinely staggering athletic difference; prime Johnson was a blazing-fast powerpuncher with durability in spades. Johnson was not only adept technically, countering in combination over Dariush’s jab/straight and hitting the body, but he also looked set to a speed that Dariush simply wasn’t capable of dealing with in exchanges.
However, where MJ has always faltered is in terms of mental strength and discipline down the stretch, and that massive comparative edge is where Dariush stole this win. As a southpaw, Dariush’s jab isn’t generally given the sort of focus it had against MJ, but he sniffed out Johnson’s extraordinarily quick trigger-finger with it; Dariush started pulling out Johnson’s counter-combos with noncommittal attacks and defending proactively, playing with timing by changing the rhythm on the jab, and using Johnson’s predictable flurries to dip him into uppercuts and blast him with the rear-hand. Johnson deserved the win on his cleaner work in 1 and 2, but Dariush was the one who fought like a winner.
Regardless of his recent resurgence, it’s unlikely that Dariush goes down as anything but a hardcore-favorite; lightweight can only grow less forgiving, and Dariush can only get older and more worn (as the Dober fight proved). That said, with how his wins have already appreciated, it’s also unlikely that Dariush’s legacy disappears; even just staying-power at 155 is something rare, much less with the gauntlet that Dariush has run. The dos Anjos comparison again comes to mind, but Dariush separates himself in a different way; where RDA’s renaissance came from hitting his athletic prime and becoming the scariest man at 155, Dariush never hit that point. Without that, Beneil Dariush remained in a minefield; he simply pressed on regardless.
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