Joshua Van Stops Tatsuro Taira, Tells Pantoja To Get Ready

I cover grappling, not MMA, but the Van vs. Taira fight is worth a technician's note because Taira is one of the cleanest jiu-jitsu flyweights on the UFC roster and the fight ended on the feet anyway. That tells you something about where grappling sits in flyweight MMA in 2026.

Taira's grappling system is built around the body lock to back-take from standing — the same near-side underhook entry that the Giles-era body lock pass uses, but applied vertically against the cage. He has finished half his career wins from the back. Against Van, he got to the body lock twice in the first three rounds and could not break Van's posture down to the mat. Van's defense was the cross-face plus the inside underhook fight — the same frame Rafa was using against pressure passes ten years ago, just standing up against the fence.

What is interesting is the failure mode. When Taira could not finish the takedown, he was the one who ended up tired in the later rounds — not Van. The body lock is a high-energy position to hold against an opponent who is actively framing, and Taira spent rounds two and three burning gas on entries that did not finish. By round five, Van's striking volume went up and Taira's hands dropped. The TKO came off a knee to the body and a follow-up combination, but the real finish was the cumulative cost of the failed grappling exchanges.

The lesson for the grappling-first MMA fighter — and this is not a new lesson, but it keeps getting re-learned at flyweight — is that a body lock entry that does not finish is worse than no entry at all. Demian Maia made a career out of knowing this. Taira has not learned it yet.

For the room: this is the argument for drilling the body lock with a hard time limit. If the entry does not produce a takedown or a back-take in fifteen seconds, you disengage. Most schools drill it open-ended, which trains the wrong instinct for MMA — and arguably for sub-only no-gi, where the same energy economy applies.

Van is not a grappler at the level this column usually covers, but his defensive framing against the cage was technically clean and worth watching the tape on if you compete in no-gi and deal with body lock entries.

Is anyone at flyweight going to solve Van's underhook fight, or does he hold the belt through 2027?