When the Capoeira King ruled octagon and cage with that left hand: relive the glory days with every knockout!
man i still remember that freezing february night in 2022 when we all huddled around the one projector that didn’t cut out halfway through the pay-per-view. we were packed in like sardines at marco’s place, the windows fogged up, the beers already emptying faster than they should’ve, and then—bam—israel throws that telegraphed leg kick and we all just froze mid-cheer, like time skipped a beat. then alex comes out of nowhere with that left hand we all grew up watching in his highlight reels and the screen just goes black for half a second. silence. then the whole room erupts like we’d just won the lottery but with more jumping and spilled beer
Been here longer than some have followed.
Right, fancy chilling with the fam that night and forgot what time the main card even started 😭 just waddling into marco’s gaff last minute, beers in hand, mate’s nan already hogging the good crisps when suddenly—BANG—first leg kick and the room just *screamed* 👹 alex still standing? we thought he’d tapped out, then BAMM—left hand SOUP 🥣 lights out INSTANT classic
Heart with the team, head on pause.
mind you, back in brum when alex was still knocking about those smaller promotions, you'd see him working that left hand off hand-stands at the end of a pad session—bloke just standing on his hands while some kid tries to block it like it’s a normal jab. absolute showman, he was. and then years later, sat in marco’s front room with half the estate piled in, that same left hand came out of nowhere like the punchline to a joke we’d all been waiting for since god knows when.
Seen it all, lads.
What I’ll say is this — we’re lucky enough to have seen both those nights in person, but they felt like completely different matches in how they arrived. That 2022 one? Pure theatre: one stiff leg kick like a stage direction, then the left hand on cue, half the room thinking the ref had accidentally hit pause. We were together in ways that don’t happen so much anymore — Marco’s place packed to the rafters with bodies and beer fumes, everyone convinced it was all set up like a WWE main event. That night Alex turned an entire living room into the octagon, the cheer so loud the windows rattled, the kind of memory you only get once in a blue moon.
Now fast-forward to today’s squad — they get the job done, no doubt, but it’s all business. Lockdowns and streaming mean most of us watch on phones in traffic or through office TVs between Zoom calls, shouting into headphones instead of at each other across a sofa. No fogged windows, no shared crisps flying across the room, none of the mad scramble for the last beer at half-time. The knockouts still land, sure, but the room isn’t the same. These days it’s more about “yeah, nice KO” and less “we just witnessed history with mates.”
yeah but remember when you were at that backstreet gym in leeds during alex’s early days and the smell of damp mats mixed with liniment was still hanging in the air while you watched him stack cans on the end of a broom handle to practice his left hand timing? that wasn’t just shadowboxing—it was alchemy. one night it’s a living-room packed so tight your mate’s mate’s cousin’s dog ends up wearing a pint, next it’s you alone in a service station car park screaming into your phone because the stream cut out twice already and all you’ve got is a dodgy cup of motorway coffee to celebrate the memory with. back then the knockouts felt like christmas come early, now they just feel like… background noise. that left hand wasn’t just power—it was poetry. and poetry needs an audience to dance with, not just a scroll of comments.
Remember when the grass was greener 🌱
who remembers the time marco’s place burned down the year before and we just rebuilt the mancave there with stolen garden furniture, a microwave nicked from the tip and a telly balanced on a stack of red bull crates—still managed to catch the next alex smashdown where he decimated some poor bloke in the prelims and the whole room nearly collapsed because someone sat on the fuse? 🤣🔥 that left hand was still hot enough to grill burgers the next morning and we all woke up with mild smoke inhalation but zero regrets