Brandon Royval came into his recent fight against Tatsuro Taira in a bit of a difficult position regarding the flyweight title picture. The former title challenger has already beaten many of the top contenders but hadn’t been able to defeat the current champion, Alexandre Pantoja.
This led to some confusion regarding the stakes of his main event clash with Taira. Whilst a win for the rising Japanese contender could have earned him a title shot, that wasn’t necessarily the same case for Royval.
The idea of either man being next to challenge Pantoja was dispelled on the day of the fight when it was announced that recent signing Kai Asakura will face the champion on his UFC debut in December.
Royval has already said that the former RIZIN fighter getting the title shot straight off the bat doesn’t bother him because a reshuffle of the division suits him well. He also told Ariel Helwani in a recent interview that this announcement didn’t negatively impact him when it happened on the day he was fighting.
“Raw Dawg” said that he already knew this fight would be next so it actually helped give him something to aim for going into what ended up being a great fight against Taira that he won via split decision.
The next title fight coming together gave him a clearer sense of direction so that he could focus on securing the win and moving on to face the winner of Pantoja and Asakura.
“I knew about that a long time ago. It just gave me a way to aim, you know what I’m saying, and that’s what I wanted. I wanted a direction to go because I’m like, ‘F***, I’m about call out three, four different people, but now that it’s, okay, there’s a title shot. Okay, I got the winner’, and it’s like, I think whoever the winner is, there are certain advantages either way. It’s just like I could go fight in Brazil or I could go fight in Japan and I think if Asakura wins, a fight in Japan would be almost a mandatory I think.”
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