You can stuff the lunge with neutral jump fierce provided he doesn’t catch you right during the jump startup and sometimes standing jab will stuff it if you luck out (and other times you’ll get hit out of it…) When I enter into a situation where I think he wants to EX lunge me and bullshit mixup for free on me, like if his life is low and mine isn’t, I usually just alternate between standing just out of range and doing jump back fierce. There’s not a lot he can do about this, you just have to be careful he doesn’t say fuck it and go for a hail mary divekick that you’re not expecting. What I mean by this is that sometimes if you do an empty jump forward or whatever (from near full screen) he can use the time you’re in the air to close a shitload of distance and then do a desperation divekick, that if you are not expecting you’ll be forced to block and then boom he is forcing you to guess.
This matchup is obnoxious but I still think it’s close to 5-5… it definitely does feel slightly in Yun’s favor though. I main Chun and I completely gave up using her against the twins because you can only win that matchup if they make big mistakes. You pretty much cannot win if they play lame and safe enough. Boxer can win this matchup by playing smart and he can afford to take some risks because he has a decent amount of HP.
I try to bait the whiffed divekicks that I can punish with standing fierce. The range you want to be in is like… right at the range where a standing fierce can stuff the whiffed divekick. From that range if you move back a little bit an EX lunge whill whiff and you can punish for free. If you move forward a little bit he has to stop spamming palm because you are just outside of your poke range. Also after moving forward a little you are around the correct range that a jump back fierce will hit certain divekicks and punish lunges. From this range he cannot divekick and make you block it.
From this range he can still do a lot of shit though. He can focus to bait out rush punches. If he holds the focus too long you can punish with max range jumping fierce xx sweep. He can risk spamming palm a little bit more, even though it’s not entirely safe at this range, he can call your bluff. If he keeps spamming you can either move into sweep/st. RH range and go for some kind of poke, or move into that range and then back up right away. He generally is spamming palm to build meter, but the main thing he wants to happen is for you to get close enough that he can divekick into you for free. If you move in and then back up, you might get him to divekick in a way that you can punish it on reaction with standing fierce, crouching fierce, or sometimes even a sweep depending on distance.
Even though on paper and with this post I’m making it sound like this range is ideal for Boxer, it feels like a marginal advantage range. You really have to be completely on point with this and err on the side of overly safe and cautious. For instance if you decide to actually walk closer and go for a standing roundhouse or sweep and he decides to divekick, you’re fucked. On the other hand if you never actually do anything and just keep trying to bait him, he can spam palm and get free meter really fast while you build no meter at all.
You want to try to force him back closer to the corner, then soft pressure him from the “ideal range” to keep him stuck in the corner until you can somehow get a life lead to sit on really hard or knock him down. He can try to whiff really shallow divekicks to close the range on you or just walk forward, which can either force you to back up or to take a risk. Taking a risk in this matchup is pretty much “being in divekick range”.
When you think back to vanilla Sagat, that matchup was 6-4 in Sagat’s favor, BUT at least it was in his favor mostly because he did so much damage and could keep you out well. Boxer vs. vanilla Sagat was at least really fun for me even though it was in Sagat’s favor. It was challenging and the main reason it was skewed in Sagat’s favor was that one mistake from you or one lucky guess from Sagat would cost you so much health. Against Sagat though, you knew what he could do. If you were at a certain range you knew he could do nothing but tigershot. From another range you knew he had the additional option of tiger knee looping you. Then you could enter a certain range where you could punish a tiger knee on block. There was another range where you could punish tiger shots with sweep etc. etc. The matchup was very fun in that there were clear cut ranges and clear cut options; usually the options from each range were slightly higher risk/reward for Sagat, but it wasn’t out of control.
Against Yun I feel like from all but max range, if you are blocking and he EX lunges, boom he’s at +1 and you’re probably going to end up taking some damage off a bad guess. If you are at any range other than the “optimal” range I described above, he can divekick and you are probably going to have to block it. If you block the high divekicks you can generally just backdash, but you’ll quickly run out of screen and even after backdashing a high divekick or teching a throw, you’re left at a range that hugely favors Yun. It just feels like most of the twins’ options are too strong in that they all have pretty low risk high reward. Yes you can punish divekicks from extremely specific ranges, but usually the punish is like a far standing fierce from really far away that flips them back so far from you that you can’t mixup afterward. The EX lunge cannot be punished on reaction, you have to do a risky neutral jump or give up a lot of space in anticipation and to discourage it. If you luck out and he happens to EX lunge as you happen to jump back fierce from the perfect range you can get a full combo, but you might happen to jump slightly too late in which he’ll get a knockdown. If you block it he’s in your face and can start divekick pressuring you.
I feel like the key to this matchup might be to lame it out, but it might also be to lame it out mixed with going for really hard pressure after a knockdown. The problem with trying to lame it out is that unless you have a substantial life lead, there are too many “free” options they can use to get in on you, the after divekick pressure starts, a lifelead doesn’t mean much. Like it’s tempting to knock him down when you have 300 more HP than him and then just bait a DP because you sure as fuck don’t want to risk getting knocked down by a DP. But then if you bait and he doesn’t DP, you’re suddenly at a really shitty range for Boxer from which Yun/Yang can go for all out divekick pressure with minimal risk. Boxer’s throw and jab mixup is really fucking strong against the twins, but if you eat a knockdown it’s really really bad. Sometimes though you’ve got to just go for it and put the pressure onto them. I’m trying to figure out how to do it as safely as I can, like with fakejumps after knockdown that land me just in range that you can’t throw me etc. Frametraps with cr. mk work really well. I’d say going for the overhead is pretty much never worth it, he can punish it on block and since it can’t combo properly why bother risking that.