yeah, style wise, Kaoklai is a
absolute(exhibit a)
mess(exhibit b).
he's always had cr@p boxing and always had that pushkick that's almost a sanshou sidekick. To quote one of those links "he's the sloppiest of the high level Thais". Got absolutely destroyed by Spong and Carnage Corbett.
To his defense, I will say a good push kick is not exactly atypical of Thais, really good ones have it.
re-watched that fight and I think I agree with you.
The clip i posted wasn't the one i watched the first time, which was only the last 3 rounds of the fight (so I'd assumed it was the whole fight).
That first round looked absolutely terrible for kaoklai.
He got out-Thai'd in the first minute. hehe
Funny thing is that palm-in-the-face style of the Sanda fighter exists in muay thai and is considered kind of "old fashioned" or "defensive style", it's how one of my coaches teaches.
Kaoklai was landing a bit with the straight right & the knee but was getting owned the rest of the time.
Secound round was sloppy in spurts but absolutely nothing from Kaoklai.
Third round KK scored a clean throw and looked to me to have edged it out.
Fourth round was a lot closer the first time around, when i started from round 3.
Bian outscored KK like crazy with punches & kicks, while having one clean throw.
Kaoklai had 3 throws, 1 ugly (which I guess didn't count), 1 clean, and 1 borderline (may not have counted).
Fifth round a little more of the same - kaoklai gets out-pointed but scores a bunch of sloppy throws.
A major difference between the 2 scoring systems is how rounds are weighted.
In muay thai, the first round is a throw-away round.
In sanshou/sanda, it's one of the most heavily scored.
As a fight progresses, in muay thai the later rounds are weighted more (imho this is more realistic), whereas in sanshou/sanda the final round seems to be a throw-away round (what I can only assume is a carry-over from amateur style scoring).
The way attacks are scored seems to be different between the two. In muay thai, if you block a kick to the head but fall over & lose your structure, the other guy still gets the point for the attack (reinforcing the "cracking the shell" concept). Pitter-patter leg kicks don't score unless they cause damage or buckling (something that Bian didn't seem to have an issue with till the 3rd round).
Also, ring dominance is a whole foreign beast in muay thai that doesn't even seem to exist in sanshou/sanda. In muay thai the stalking fighter gets credit for being the stalker, a running fighter tends to lose credit - i wouldn't say it's a formal score anything, but it can be that little extra difference. Sanshou/sanda is still very much point based in that only what lands seems to affect scoring. I think ring dominance should not be a deciding factor in a fight; meaning it should only come into play if all # of landed strikes are equal. A guy shouldn't be dinged for running if he's still teeing off on the other fighter. So I can see benefits to chinese scoring here.