Las Vegas, NV — Women’s flyweight prospect Erin Blanchfield picked up her third consecutive win inside the octagon on Saturday — but had to overcome a bid of adversity to do so.
Blanchfield (9-1) was rocked early in her fight against JJ Aldrich, but recovered and came back to win early in the second care of a tight guillotine choke.
While getting rocked is never part of the game plan, Blanchfield isn’t a fighter who tries to stick too closely to any sort of script.
“I don’t usually have like a super-strict game plan, I just kind of have things I want to do, like— we wanted to cut her off because she uses a lot of movement, use my strikes to close the distance, maybe get a takedown,” Blanchfield told Cageside Press and other media outlets back stage at the UFC Apex following the fight. “She was definitely harder to take down than I expected, and she had good body lock takedowns as well, she actually took me down a few times. So yeah, I didn’t have a super structured game plan, just little details that we wanted to work.”
Fans may have been a bit let down to see a top-flight prospect opening up the preliminary card, but Blanchfield was happy to get the fight out of the way early.
“I knew exactly when I was gonna be fighting. 10 AM, I’d be fighting, I’d be able to get it in early, and now I can go celebrate the rest of the day.”
Early is one thing, but UFC Vegas 56 came with an extra early start time locally. 10AM feels like a bit of a stretch, no? Blanchfield admitted that “it was definitely a little weird. I usually spar at 10AM anyway, so I kind of just kept that in my mind, I was like ‘well you know I spar at this time anyway so why not fight at this time?'”
Having started her UFC career with three consecutive wins, and scoring her first finish in the octagon against Aldrich, New York native Blanchfield believes she should get a ranked opponent next.
“I want the winner of [Jessica] Eye vs. [Maycee] Barber. I think either of those girls would be a good fight for me,” Blanchfield told us. “And if not them, I definitely want someone in the rankings. I’m 3-0 now in the UFC and I think I deserve that.”
Preferably that fight, or whatever comes next, will be at home, inside the historic Madison Square Garden. “It’s the only place that I want to fight, I don’t really care anywhere else.”
Watch the full UFC Vegas 56 post-fight media scrum with Erin Blanchfield above.
