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ADCC Rookie Report: Owen Jones
Owen Jones's Pace, Pressure, And Creativity At ADCC
William
May 3rd, 2024
First Things First
In the lead up to this year’s ADCC World Championships we’re going to analyze the game’s of the athletes competing. If you want to read about ADCC’s newcomers so you can learn the skills, strengths, and patterns their games present, the ADCC Rookie Reports are for you.
Today we’re talking about Owen Jones.
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Table of Contents
ADCC Rookie Report
We’re back with another ADCC Rookie Report! In the lead up to the 2024 ADCC World Championships we’ll be analyzing the winning runs of athletes that have qualified for their first ADCC World Championship.
How do they win? What makes their game interesting and unique? What opportunities does that game present for their opponents? You can read previous rookie reports here:
We’re constraining these rookie reports to only what the athletes showed in their trials winning performances. This time we’re looking at Owen Jones’s creative guard work, and how he breaks people with outside passing.
Owen Jones
Jones is a -66KG qualifier from the United Kingdom. He and Jozef Chen both set the record for youngest European trials winner at 19 on the same day. The main thing that stands out about his game is how fast he is.
His furious pace pushes him in, out, and around guards. He generally uses loose outside passing on top to get near north-south or find the back.
On bottom, Jones will scoop the leg to attack leg locks, or he’ll hunt for no-gi berimbolos to reclaim top position. On top of all that, he just looks like he’s having fun. On more than one occasion, Jones scored, looked at the crowd, and nodded approvingly at what he did. “You see that? Now watch this.”
Leg Entanglements To Get A Leg Up
In Jones’s earlier matches he showed why he’s making a name for himself, creative leg entanglements. Since winning trials he’s even gone on to make an instructional on the reverse closed guard position. Let’s look at it.
Here Jones scoops the Abdullah’s leg. As Abdullah stands, Jones enters K guard. Because Abdullah hinges back and stands straight Jones locks his legs around Abdullah to enter reverse closed guard. Jones ends with a toe hold. |  Owen Jones vs Wali Abdullah |
Generally, when someone stands out of your K guard, they can back their hips up and push your feet away to kill the position. Adbullah was trying to do just that above.
Closing your legs around them for the reverse closed guard more or less prevents this from happening while giving you direct access to the toe hold. Let’s look at some key elements below.
Once Jones locks his hands around Abdullah’s leg he never lets go
Abdullah stands and backs his hips up so Jones can’t pull the leg onto his chest to start attacking it
Jones gets his head all the way behind Abdullah, giving him an unobstructed path to attack the toe hold from reverse closed guard
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