5 reasons why Khabib Nurmagomedov is the GOAT

#3 Khabib has furthered the evolution of MMA

Khabib Nurmagomedov of Russia compete against Dustin Poirier of United States

When wrestlers started to dominate the sport of MMA in the early 2000s, strikers realised the importance of keeping the fight at their desired distance and 'sprawl and brawl' became the order of the day.

However, the wrestlers learnt to mix takedowns with their striking, thus nullifying the defence of a 'sprawl'. Thus came the wall walk, where a fighter makes his way to the cage, pushes up against it (without giving up his back), gets under-hooks and uses it to escape a wrestler's attempts to hold him down.

Most top fighters and top-gyms use wall-walking as their go-to strategy to get up from the mat. Khabib has many great attributes, but his work against the cage is unparalleled in the sport.

Not a single fighter he has faced has had the answer to Khabib's cage wrestling. It is almost a foregone conclusion when you see his opponent against the cage, as he sucks in their hips, crosses them over and rains down ground pound. If a fighter tries to turn with his arms on the mat, he uses the 'Dagestani Handcuff' to control one arm and punch with the other rendering his opponent defenseless.

If, by the odd chance, his opponent fights his way back to feet, his pressure against the fence and trips take them down straight away and they have to start from scratch again.

These chain wrestling sequences against the cage breaks his opponents - physically and mentally.

There are a handful of fighters who have started to pick up on the tendencies of strikers to wall-walk such as Dan Ige, Kamaru Usman and Khabib's teammate Islam Makhachev.

Before Khabib's immaculate work against the fence, we had never really seen a grappler use the cage to their advantage in such devastating fashion before.