Fight Coverage
Coach Conversation | Valentina Shevchenko vs Manon Fiorot
Xtreme Couture MMA Coach Eddie Barraco Taps In To Talk Saturday’s UFC 315 Flyweight Title Fight
Championship fights are layered battles, with the competitors stepping into the Octagon operating at the highest level in their respective weight classes.
Breaking down how these pivotal contests could possibly play out is a challenging venture, which is why UFC staff writer E. Spencer Kyte has taken to enlisting the help of some of the sharpest minds in the sport to help dissect these critical contests.
For the first of this weekend’s twin title fights at UFC 315, Kyte sat down with Xtreme Couture MMA coach Eddie Barraco to break down what could transpire when Valentina Shevchenko begins her second reign as a flyweight champion in a fascinating matchup with French challenger Manon Fiorot.
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Best Trait of Each Fighter
Kyte: All right Coach, let’s do this — what’s the best trait of Valentina Shevchenko and what’s the best trait of Manon Fiorot?
Barraco: Shevchenko, for me, it’s her Fight IQ.
She has tons of experience, title defenses, five-round fights. I think her Fight IQ and her versatility are the biggest things. She’s super-cerebral, and her ability to adjust mid-fight — to read patterns and adjust to those things — are huge. For this one especially, I think being able to mix her striking with her grappling fluidly is something that will give her a well-rounded edge here.
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With Fiorot, she does a really good job with distance management and striking volume. If you look at her last fight, it was like 181 total strikes; that’s good volume.
I think she’s good at keeping opponents at the end of her strikes, using her range, and her footwork, combined with the distance control and high output striking, is what has made her frustrating for other fighters to try and solve.
Kyte: I agree with you completely on the Shevchenko front, and I think we saw that even more so in the last fight with Grasso in September.
She’s at that point now where she’s just happy to go out and win however she has to win. I think that draw with Alexa changed everything for her. I think it was a case of “these judges screwed me, I should have been champ, now I’ve gotta wait to do this whenever, and I’m just gonna go out and beat you where I know I can beat you without much trouble, and I’m gonna wrestle you into oblivion.”
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Barraco: Easiest path to victory. Why would I play into your positive attributes as far as the fight goes?
Coach Follis used to say all the time, “I don’t want it to be a fair fight.” He would say, “I don’t mean go out and cheat, but if you’re a boxer, I’m certainly not gonna go out there and just box you the whole time.”
It’s an MMA fight — take it where it needs to go for what you can do, what they can do, but also what they can’t do or what you can’t do.
Kyte: And then on the Fiorot front — I agree with you about her ability to use the range and the volume — the other part for me is that she’s just a big, physically strong fighter.
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We see five-foot-seven and think, “That’s not overly big,” but for a female fighter, at flyweight; it’s big. We know the cut is difficult, but she uses all of that size, all of that strength, all of that physicality, couple with the fact that she’s gonna hit you a bazillion times.
Barraco: I agree completely, and it’s gonna be a test to see what Valentina is able to do with somebody her size. It’s gonna be interesting.
Kyte: For sure, and for me, I love these situations where the best traits kind of interact with each other in this way.
Val is cerebral, so she’s smart at figuring out what she needs to do, and so her best path to victory — which we’ll get to in a second — is probably to take her down, but it may not be as easy as taking down Alexa Grasso because Fiorot has got a couple inches on her, and knows how to use her size, sink her hips down, and keep herself upright.
We’re gonna see strength against strength, but they’re contrasting.
Path to Victory
Kyte: So what’s the path to victory for each of them?
Barraco: For Valentina, I think her tactical grappling and finding her counters amidst all the volume (is the path to victory).
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If she can slow down Fiorot’s pace, take away her rhythm, and then win the exchanges — even if it’s at the end of the exchanges — with those well-timed counters and takedowns, that’ll be really important. I think being able to control her on the ground and positional dominance will be the biggest key because she doesn’t have to go in there trying to get crazy subs; if she can go in there and control the position, have some damage there, I think that’s the easiest path to victory.
For Manon, I think it’s pressure and range striking.
She can’t take her foot off the gas, backpedal the whole time and try to avoid her, not that I think she’s gonna try to. But I think pressure, range striking, maintaining her lateral movement, andracking up the volume she typically does are super-important. Avoiding the clinch and ground engagements will be a good thing for her, too.
Those are gonna be her keys.
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Kyte: I’m trying to think of the fight this needs to be for Shevchenko in terms of her previous opponents, previous fights, and how she’s beaten them, and I don’t know that there is really a comp in terms of bigger, stronger opponents.
Liz Carmouche is a wrestler, so that was kind of a methodical kickboxing match. Jennifer Maia is a good grappler, and that was a little bit of everything, where Jen won a round and everyone freaked out about that, but there’s not really a comp here.
Maybe the Taila Santos fight, but I don’t think she wants that to be her comp here because she maybe kinda lost that fight, or at the very least it was crazy-close.
Barraco: Great point — you definitely don’t wanna repeat that.
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Kyte: Whereas for Fiorot, she’s been so good that we haven’t really seen her in those spots where there is too much to draw on when you’re thinking about tough spots in a fight.
Barraco: We just haven’t seen it.
Kyte: And part of that is because she uses her size well. Erin Blanchfield couldn’t get close to taking her down, and Erin is a very good grappler.
I think this is where what you’re saying about Valentina’s wrestling and timely takedowns being super-important comes in. Can she get you coming in? Can she hit you with something and run you down? Get you backing up and changing levels?
Barraco: For sure; I agree.
X Factor
Kyte: If there is an X-factor in this fight, what would it be?
Barraco: I think for Valentina, her experience in five-round wars is a huge one, and with that, her ability to calm under pressure, which we’ve already seen from her plenty. I think if the fight goes deep, Valentina’s championship mettle could really shine there, especially if she’s putting Fiorot in unfamiliar waters.
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Like you just said: we haven’t seen a lot of the positions and spots that maybe she is gonna be put in in this fight, so we don’t know how she’s going to be responding. And if Valentina is taking her to those unfamiliar waters, how is she going to respond? We don’t know.
For Manon, it’s her relentless pace and her physicality, which we’ve mentioned a couple times; her being a bigger fighter for the weight. If she can exert that, maybe we see Valentina not responding to it as well as we think she will; that would be a huge factor for her.
She could push a pace that forces Valentina to fight reactively, on the back-pedal — that’s not somewhere she’s usually at, so I would try to dictate that pace and possibly steal rounds that way.
Kyte: It’s interesting — we talk about the championship thing every time we get one of these fights, especially when it’s someone that hasn’t been there before.
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Obviously I don’t know — I’m not a fighter, I’ve never cornered somebody in that situation — but from covering the sport for 15 years, I’ve seen enough fights where I can tell that with some people, when they get to this spot, it’s just a bit much for them.
I think Diego Lopes was like that against (Alexander) Volkanovski, early. He settled in and figured it out, but the step up in competition of going from (Dan) Ige and (Brian) Ortega is a bigger step up than you’re used to, and it’s the lights, and it’s all the pressure, and he’s getting into it during the week with Yair.
It felt like those first two rounds, he was just a little off.
Barraco: Yep!
Kyte: There is none of that with Val and there was none of that with Volk. This is her 12th straight title fight.
Barraco: Wow! That’s crazy. That’s actually wild.
Kyte: And so you’re up against that!
I do agree with you on the Fiorot point about can she make Val go backwards and be the aggressor in there. The thing that I’m really interested in is the weight cut and time off because Fiorot hasn’t fought in 14, 15 months and you’ve got to get to 125.0 pounds on the scale; there are no allowances.
Barraco: And that last pound is the worst!
Kyte: I just want to see what she looks like throughout the week, because she’s been waiting onthis one. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? She could come out dialed in, ready to go, been working the last year to keep the weight low, figure out how to make the cut a little easier…
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Barraco: Yeah, there is certainly something to be said for that much time off. Did she do all the right things, keep her weight down? It can be beneficial because you’ve been preparing for this opponent for this long.
We’ll see. We’ll see if her sparring has been correct for all the time off. Have you been getting those hard rounds in where you’re getting that timing down? Sometimes that is needed.
Julian (Erosa) who just fought, he hadn’t fought in like 10 months, where his last win was against Christian Rodriguez — he goes on to fight two fights and Julian was still waiting to fight! We had to make those adjustments in the gym to keep him sharp for that time, so it’ll be interesting to see on her part.
Kyte: Is that just a timing thing, a rhythm thing where you lose a little of that sharpness when you’re not in those live moments, so you need a couple scraps in the gym to build that back?
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Barraco: Yeah, you have to get your timing, get your ability to relax in those moments, remember what it feels like, control the adrenaline. Timing is a huge thing — being able to time the offense and the defense — when you’re throwing that hard and they’re throwing that hard.
Kyte: Is there a way to simulate that? For people that have never been in the gym, never been around these athletes, how close would you say you need to be getting? Is it 70 percent, 80 percent?
Barraco: Yeah, usually in the 75 percent range. Most of them aren’t sparring with boxing gloves, but the big difference is when you hurt somebody in the gym, you’re not looking to finish.
You land a liver shot or you rock them hard and you know it, you’re checking on them, and then maybe you tone it down for a bit. We have guys in the gym that just bang all the time — typically the younger generation — but we say all the time, “You can’t win practice! Nobody is getting paid for this and you can’t win this; the goal is to get better, learn, and be a good teammate.”
One Coaching Curiosity
Kyte: If there is a curiosity point for you as a coach, as an observer that you’re looking out for, what would it be?
Barraco: So I have three points of interest for Valentina, which are how she’s gonna time her counters against the volume-heavy combos, whether she shoots for takedowns early in the fight to slow the tempo, and her ability to adapt mid-fight to the footwork and the angles of her opponent.
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Those are the things I have. I wanna see how she deals with the volume: is she going to look for striking combos or the moments to shoot off those combos and exchanges? How she’s going to not be moving backwards and how she’s going to assert her dominance in that one?
For Fiorot, I have discipline in avoiding the clinch and prolonged exchanges. I think with her ability, it should be she strikes, she moves, she strikes, she moves, and if she doesn’t get moving backwards in a straight line for too long.
I wanna see how she deals with Valentina’s feints and traps. I think she (Shevchenko) has some of the best striking in the division, and I think her experience in striking, using her feints and her traps, getting people to put their hands where she wants them to go, like how she fought Jessica (Eye), right — body kick, body kick, body kick, head kick. I wanna she how her opponent can deal with that.
And then whether she can maintain her pace over those five rounds against somebody that is a counter-heavy opponent. Volume for three rounds versus volume for five rounds, with some time off, getting pressured, if she’s getting into some clinch exchanges — how is all that going to wear on her as far as her ability to push that pace and volume?
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Kyte: I didn’t realize her stats were as high as they are. I’ve got them up here and she’s landing 6.25 significant strikes per minute; that’s a lot.
Barraco: Oh yeah!
Kyte: You go through and it’s not just the early fights where she was blowing people out either. She was putting up those numbers against Mayra Bueno Silva too. She’s putting them up against everyone she’s fought.
She’s just coming with a lot.
Barraco: Looking at her stats is crazy. She’s doing it all.
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Kyte: The other thing for me, and I hate being this guy, but it’s just one of those things: Valentina turned 37 a couple months ago, and she’s been able to get away with it because Alexa made the absolute most of that first fight, had the situation read and capitalized, but she got a gift in the second fight with the draw, and then had nothing for her in the third fight, and I think that has allowed us to kind of forget that these have been four fights now for Shevchenko where it hasn’t been the same Shevchenko we’re used to.
And I just wonder is she 90 percent of who she was at her peak? 85 percent? Maybe that’s still enough to win and her 85 percent is better than everyone else, but Fiorot feels like a real good test of that.
Barraco: 100 percent. Age makes a difference; we see it time and time again where they’re fine, they’re fine, they’re fine, and then all of a sudden they don’t look great.
Kyte: And we thought that with the Santos fight, and that was three years ago now. We got away from it because she looked good in the second fight and dominated last time, but there was a point two years ago where it was back-to-back fights where she just ekes one out against Taila Santos and then makes a mistake and loses against Alexa, and we’re wondering if she’s slipping.
She’s gotten back to it, but is this the fight where we see a little erosion again?
View Valentina Shevchenko's Athlete Profile Page
Barraco: She’s been doing this a long time, too.
Kyte: It’s gonna be interesting; I’m really looking forward to this one.
Barraco: For sure!
UFC 315: Muhammad vs Della Maddalena took place live from Bell Centre in Montréal, Québec, Canada on May 10, 2025. See the final Prelim & Main Card Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC FIGHT PASS!
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