Rose Namajunas was not at all surprised by her first-round knockout victory over Joanna J?drzejczyk at UFC 217.
Ahead of UFC 217 last November, Joanna Jedrzejczyk opened up as a heavy favorite against then-challenger Rose Namajunas, and rightfully so. Not many people were expecting such an outcome, where “Thug Rose” ended up dethroning the two-year strawweight champion via first-round knockout.
Namajunas, however, was not surprised by the outcome and was not at all intimidated by J?drzejczyk’s striking prowess that led to a dominant run in the UFC alone.
“(I knew I was going to knock her out) because everyone is so desperate for the takedown,” Namajunas said on a recent episode of the JRE MMA Show (transcript via MMAjunkie). “Everyone tries to take her down from what I see. I stand across from Valentina Shevchenko, and we go back-and-forth, and it’s not a thing to me. I’ve got Pat ‘HD’ Barry in my corner. I’ve got Trevor Wittman. I’ve done taekwondo striking my entire life. It’s not something I’ve never seen before.”
“That Dutch style of kickboxing, that’s great, that’s hard. It’s very intimidating to stand across from, but you know it’s very rhythmic on the beat. It’s just something: It looks scary, but it’s nothing to be scared of.”
Namajunas and J?drzejczyk are now headed for a rematch scheduled to co-headline UFC 223, and the newly-minted champion is expecting this fight to be a bigger challenge than their first encounter.
“That’s the tough part (doing a rematch). You can’t paint the Mona Lisa twice,” Namajunas said. “It has to be something different, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, either. We’ve just got to keep doing what we’re doing but keep getting better obviously all the time.”
UFC 223 is scheduled to take place on April 7th in Brooklyn. It will be headlined by a lightweight title fight between Tony Ferguson and Khabib Nurmagomedov.