Cliff Judge

Here are a handful of semi-related thoughts about this:

1) This guy is clearly arguing that basic Aikido techniques are not effective in a street fight. You are unlikely to find anyone on this board who will disagree with that. The basic foot work is not designed for maximum effectiveness in a mugging, it is designed to challenge your neuro-muscular system and give you an opportunity to work on various building blocks of what MAY be, personally for you, effective technique at a later stage of your development.

2) Sometimes when I am on the mat, my kotegaeshi looks just like Dan's modifications....and sometimes that's good and other times it is not. He kind of looks a little vulnerable in that first .gif where he is doing his modified wrist-twist. You really need to have your partner's balance to reduce the threat of that other hand or the feet.

3) One of the assumptions Dan is making here is that you have to allow the force of the incoming punch to just go. Seems to me that sometimes you actually want to seize that wrist, for example if there is a knife in it. I just wrote about this in another thread - maybe he's got another knife in his other hand, a tenkan movement might be something you want to do to avoid that OTHER knife.

4) Dan doesn't seem to be considering a multi-attacker scenario here either.

5) Heck, it isn't just that sometimes you want to seize the wrist. Sometimes you just wind up with that wrist in your hand, and a large turning kote gaeshi is the right thing to do.

Basically, footwork is structured and defined for the purpose of training basics of posture and movement. An applied situation is a much more fluid situation.