LAS VEGAS – [autotag]Valentina Shevchenko[/autotag] has one focus going into a historic third meeting with Alexa Grasso at UFC 306, and that’s to ensure the judges don’t have a say in the result.
The former women’s flyweight champ Shevchenko (23-4-1 MMA, 12-3-1 UFC) will share the octagon with current champ Grasso (16-3-1 MMA, 8-3-1 UFC) for the third consecutive time on Sept. 14 in the first live sporting event at Sphere.
Shevchenko is currently 0-1-1 in the rivalry. At UFC 285, she was submitted in Round 4, dropping the title to Grasso and crowning her the first Mexican woman to win a UFC title. The rematch took place six months later at Noche UFC, but the result was a split draw.
To this day, Shevchenko believes she won the fight and is heavily critical of the scorecards, especially judge Mike Bell’s 10-8 score in Round 5, which led to a 47-47 draw total on his card.
This time around, “Bullet” wants to avoid the judges altogether.
“The concern is to finish the fight,” Shevchenko told reporters at UFC 306 media day. “This is No. 1 what’s in my head. It’s like when to seize opportunity, just do what you have to do, one hundred percent. Finish the fight.”
The trilogy bout, like the second meeting, takes place at a Noche UFC event, themed around Mexican Independence Day. This time, it’s “a love letter” to Mexico, as UFC CEO Dana White has dubbed the event. With Grasso being a Mexican champion, naturally, the crowd will be heavily in her favor.
However, Shevchenko isn’t concerned with the outside noise, as she’s had to deal with that throughout her career. In fact, she recalls a time she had to deal with adverse forces inside the confined competitive space.
“Definitely like all my career, I was fighting so many places, so many different fighters in their home countries like against not only the opponent, crowd, but I had world muay Thai championship where I had to ‘fight’ against the referee,” Shevchenko explained.
“There was a woman referee who was actually doing everything. I was fighting the final with a Thai girl, and she was doing everything like taking points from me and prohibited permitted techniques, so she invented that I couldn’t do it. … No matter what, I won the fight, and you know, when she was raising my arm, she said, ‘You’re very lucky.’ Because what she was trying to do, it’s never worked.”
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For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 306.