Nina Milosevic hadn’t even cooled down from her second-round TKO of Priscila Cachoeira before she started pitching her next booking. Speaking to the media Saturday after UFC Fight Night 293 (the event the UFC was hashtagging as UFC Vegas 124), Milosevic said she’s already thinking about the UFC Sydney card. She wants to be on it alongside her teammate, Lucia Szabova.
The Sydney-based fighter had a tidy business case ready, too. “I’m already there, so financially, they don’t have to pay for my flight,” she said, per MMA Junkie. That’s a fighter who knows exactly who she’s negotiating with. On sharing a card with Szabova, she added, “That would be amazing,” and said their whole camp and support system would turn out. “All our sponsors will be there,” she said, before suggesting a good chunk of the crowd would be showing up for the two of them as much as for the headliners.
How she got here
The win moved Milosevic to 10-1 overall and 2-0 in the UFC. It was her second Octagon finish in three months, which is a ridiculous pace by modern UFC standards. Cachoeira drops to 13-10 overall and 5-10 inside the promotion. The fight was on the main card at the Meta APEX in Las Vegas, and UFC Español’s broadcast clips showed Milosevic closing the show with a flurry of punches on the Brazilian.
The plan was basic and brutal. Milosevic said the idea was to push Cachoeira to the fence, take her down and hunt for the finish with ground-and-pound or a submission, whichever showed up first. “I followed through, and we eventually got the TKO in the second round,” she said.
She had real respect for the opponent, too, describing Cachoeira as a veteran who can’t be pushed around easily. Her solution was to keep Cachoeira from having any time to think, or in her words, “just try to bully a bully a little bit.” She also tipped her cap to Cachoeira’s toughness: “She’s always got that dog in her.”
The activity pitch
Sydney is one piece of a larger argument Milosevic is making. She wants to fight constantly. She said she follows the whole women’s roster, including the pay-per-view fighters outside her own division, and that if she comes out of a fight unhurt, she sees no reason to stop. She didn’t want to waste an eight-week camp by sitting around afterward. “If I can continue the roll, I will. I really want to be active,” she said.
The UFC hasn’t announced her for Sydney, and there’s no word yet on whether Szabova will get a spot on that card either.
My take: give her the fight. I love a fighter who calls her shot, and Milosevic called the whole thing, the opponent study, the fence, the takedown, the ground-and-pound, then went out and did all of it against a 15-fight UFC veteran. She’s now asking to fight in her adopted hometown, beside her teammate, with her sponsors in the building, and she’s even offering to save the company a plane ticket. Matchmakers get pitched worse ideas every week by fighters who’d rather sit on a ranking than fight. A 10-1 finisher who wants to be busy is exactly what a Sydney card should be built around. Book her before somebody else in the division gets the date.
