Valentina Shevchenko lets Joanna Jedrzejczyk know that flyweight is her ‘territory’

The second UFC women’s flyweight title bout in the promotion’s history takes place next month on December 8 at UFC 231 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The bout will feature one-time bantamweight title challenger, Valentina ‘Bullet’ Shevchenko as she faces the former strawweight champion, Joanna Jedrzejczyk.

This will be the pairs first meeting inside an MMA enclosure. However, they have met three times before in the ring for Muay Thai competition. All three times have gone in favor of Shevchenko.

Now set to compete for some UFC gold this time around, Shevchenko doesn’t expect things to go much differently, and she has her reasons as to why as she told FloCombat.

“Strawweight, they have one power, but in flyweight, the girls have totally different power. You can be the best one in the strawweight [division] but here it’s a totally different feel. Because this is not someone who has less power than you. This is someone who has more power than you. This is where I feel it’s my territory.

You can be queen and she loves to say that she’s queen and she can be queen in her field and her field is strawweight. She was before she lost her title. This is my territory. Here she cannot say nothing.”

Although she has made her name in the strawweight division, Joanna Jedrzejczyk was actually a flyweight prior to her career with the UFC. That potentially being only because the UFC didn’t have the division at the time that Jedrzejczyk was brought in.

Perhaps it was a good thing though because as they say, the rest is history.

Despite feeling like she will be better in her return to the flyweight division, Jedrzejczyk still stated recently that she plans to go back down to her 115-pound home of strawweight (via FloCombat).

“Yes, I will go back. Definitely, I will go back. Somehow yes, I want to face myself, go through the weight cut again, drop to 115. I’m not having problems with the weight. I want to go through this and face the champion again. I hope that Rose Namajunas has been a great champion for the UFC, she’s been the champion for a year now.

When I lost the belt, I was like, ‘What’s now?’ It’s been a year already. I’m happy. I have a bunch of great fans. I have a life outside the Octagon. But I want to face the champion in the strawweight division next year.”

For each Valentina Shevchenko and Joanne Jedrzejczyk, their most recent fights both came at two rather distant times as Jedrezjczyk has been slightly more active than her Peruvian counterpart.

Jedrzejczyk’s last fight came at the end of July when she snapped her two-fight losing streak to Rose Namajunas by scoring a unanimous decision win over Tecia Torres.

As for Valentina Shevchenko, she fought Priscila Cachoeira in May when she returned to flyweight to get the second-round submission victory.

on 11/26/2018