Tatiana Suarez confident she can beat Rose Namajunas more decisively than she just beat Carla Esparza
Last weekend, on the undercard of the action-packed UFC 228 card in Dallas, Texas, The Ultimate Fighter 23 winner Tatiana Suarez picked up her biggest win to date, walloping inaugural UFC strawweight champion Carla Esparza to a third-round TKO victory.
Having earned this massive win, Tatiana Suarez is now just a few short steps away from a title fight with UFC strawweight champion Rose Namajunas. And while she might have to take another fight in the meantime, she feels she’s more than capable dispatching Namajunas when they inevitably share the cage. In fact, she believes she can thump Namajunas even more decisively than she just beat Carla Esparza. Esparza, after all, is a wrestler, and Suarez soundly out-wrestled her. Namajunas, meanwhile, is not a wrestler.
“I think I’ll do the same thing I did to Esparza, I’ll do the same thing to Rose,” Tatiana Suarez told the Top Turtle MMA Podcast on FloCombat. “It actually might be worse because Rose isn’t nearly as good of a wrestler as Esparza. She’s longer, but that’s about it.”
“We saw what Esparza did to Rose,” she added. “And I think I’m the best wrestler in the division.”
Tatiana Suarez also compared her own skills to those of other top strawweight contenders like Jessica Andrade and Claudia Gadelha. While she considers her rivals dangerous, she believes her wrestling makes her even better than they are.
“I think [people in my division] know how to shoot, they’re powerful—like Claudia [Gadelha] and [Jessica] Andrade,” she said. “There’s a difference between knowing how to shoot and actually knowing how to wrestle. I know how to wrestle.”
“I know second, third, fourth, chain wrestling—chain wrestling and scrambling—that’s what I’m known for,” Suarez said. “Even when they think they’re going to get out, they’re not.”
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This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 9/12/2018.
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