Last November’s UFC 217 event at Madison Square Garden produced plenty of memorable moments. Rose Namajunas was a big underdog when she took on longtime unbeaten champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk (on November 4), but Namajunas stunned the Garden crowd and the pay-per-view audience by scoring a first-round knockout to claim the strawweight championship.
Many felt Joanna Jedrzejczyk would be the one to surpass Ronda Rousey’s title defense record, but Rose put a full-stop to all that.
A rematch has been set for UFC 223 on April 7 at Barclays Center. Interestingly Khabib Nurmagomedov fighting Tony Ferguson in the main event, the co-main will be Joanna Jedrzejczyk’s highly anticipated rematch with Rose Namajunas.
Namajunas aka Thug Rose believes she’ll get the submission and cement herself as the best strawweight on the planet by defeating Jedrzejczyk in their upcoming fight.
“It’s probably the most exciting fight that everybody can look forward to. I think that’s a big part of [Joanna Jedrzejczyk getting the immediate rematch], but also I don’t see anybody else that can really challenge at this point. You’ve got Jessica Andrade and Tecia [Torres] will probably be the only other one, maybe Claudia Gadelha but I thought she was injured. Joanna’s beaten all those girls, other than Tecia obviously, but she’s way far ahead of those other girls. […] I had a perfect gampelan for everything that [Jedrzejczyk] was doing. I knew exactly where she was going to be, where she was, I’ve been studying her for many years and knew exactly what she was going to do before she did it.”
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— UFC (@ufc) February 9, 2018
“My boxing is really what set that [knockout] up. Classic boxing. Establish the jab and she’ll get focused on that. As you can see from the video, she was pawing at the jab. She thought it was a jab but it was really a leaping left hook. […] Hopefully she made some changes and she won’t have that [bad weight cutting] excuse this time around and we’ll see the best version of her. We’ll have an awesome women’s MMA fight and I’ll be the best in the world once again. […] My predictions is I’m going to punch her in the face, take her back and choke her out this time.” — Rose Namajunas speaking to Luke Thomas on SiriusXM Rush.
This is a big opportunity for Rose Namajunas to silence anyone who wrote her huge upset win off a some sort of a fluke.
Namajunas holds submission wins over Paige VanZant and another former Invicta title holder, Angela Hill, along with an impressive flying armbar over Kathina Catron in the early days of her professional career.
Do you guys think Rose Namajunas once again going to shock the world at UFC 223?
