HOLLY’S WISH
Holly Holm believes she deserves a rematch — and she’s not alone
As a professional boxer, Holly Holm was the queen of the rematch. She had 10 of them, going 8-0-2 in those fights.
Now, as an MMA fighter, there’s a rematch she’d love to have — one she believes she deserves. She’s not alone. Holm, a loser on the scorecards but a winner in the court of public opinion Saturday night in Brooklyn, N.Y., finds herself in a curious position. The Albuquerquean’s controversial loss to Germaine de Randamie was her third in a row, a situation that has relegated more than one UFC contract fighter to the scrap heap. That’s not likely to happen to Holm, if only because she forever will be the woman who so dramatically exposed Ronda Rousey as human after all.
Nonetheless, after the loss to de Randamie with the newly minted UFC featherweight title bout on the line, Holm (10-3) was realistic about her future.
Asked in post-fight interviews whether she expected to campaign at featherweight or return to bantamweight, she said, “I’m sitting in a spot where I’ve lost my last three fights . ... So, I’m gonna take whatever they’ll (offer).”
She made it clear, though that she hopes the UFC’s offer is a rematch with de Randamie.
“I would think that they would want to give a rematch,” Holm said. “... My job is to train and fight, and (the UFC’s) job is to promote, so I just hope I get the opportunity.”
Saturday, all three official judges scored the
fight 48-47 for de Randamie. A great many people lit up Twitter in disagreement, including UFC champions Amanda Nunes and Joanna Jedrzejczyk. Retired champion and Holm nemesis Miesha Tate saw it that way as well.
“I think it warrants a rematch,” Holm said. “I think when more than half the people are saying the fight should have gone the other way, usually that warrants a rematch. So I think that would be awesome.”
The opinions expressed by Nunes, Jedrzejczyk and Tate all were dependent of the fight’s great controversy — the shots de Randamie landed to Holm’s head after the horn sounded at the end of rounds two and three.
Almost unanimously in the MMA world, it was felt that de Randamie (7-3) should have been penalized a point at least on the second occasion. Such a penalty would have changed the outcome of the fight to a draw and made a rematch, if not mandatory, certainly the thing to do.
Holm, convinced the illegal shots from de Randamie were intentional — something the Dutch fighter denied — said she firmly believed referee Todd Anderson should have deducted a point.
But, Holm also said, it needn’t have come to that.
Whatever comes next and whomever she fights, she said, she must perform better than she did Saturday night.
Twice, once with a head kick, once with a left hand, Holm had de Randamie hurt.
“You look at the scoring and you look at how the ref was supposed to (perform), you look at those things, yes,” Holm said. “That really changed the way the whole fight went.
“But I also could have capitalized when I had her hurt, and that would have changed the whole way the fight went.”
Not everyone agreed that Holm was robbed.
As Valentina Shevchenko had done in her July victory over Holm, de Randamie landed a high volume of counter punches — especially in the first three rounds.
And Holm spent a surprising amount of time in clinches, asserting her physical dominance by holdng de Ramandie against the fence but not accomplishing much. Several Holm takedown attempts were easily thwarted.
“I didn’t do as much damage as I wanted to do when I had her on the cage,” Holm said. “... I think it’s kind of not fully committing to the takedown.
“If I wasn’t going to commit to it, I should have stepped back and striked. That was my fault.”
Since the loss to Shevchenko, Holm has said many times that she failed that night to follow the fight plan coaches Mike Winkeljohn and Greg Jackson had devised.
On that front, against de Randamie, Holm’s evaluation was better but not good enough.
“Part of that is just feeling the fight as it goes,” she said, “especially when I had her rocked and she literally dropped to her knees. I just put her in a clinch, and that was stupid.”
Holm was asked what she needed to do in order to improve her focus on the fight plan.
Uncharacteristically tight-lipped, she said, “I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.”
If there’s to be a Holm-de Randamie update, there could be a delay. De Randamie said in the Octagon after the fight that she needs surgery to repair ligaments in her hand, torn in a previous fight.