Savannah Marshall prepares to make her MMA
debut in less than four weeks time 👀#PFLNewcastle |
Saturday 8th June | Utilita Arena, Newcastle | Tickets on SALE NOW!
🔗 in bio | LIVE on DAZN pic.twitter.com/JD50b8958U— PFL Europe (@PFLEurope)
May 13, 2024
Savannah
Marshall didn’t necessarily expect to get such a big stage for
her professional mixed martial arts debut.
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Thanks to a background as a boxing champion, her signing with
Professional Fighters League was met with some measure of
fanfare. However, Marshall would have been willing to pay her dues
on an undercard in her first MMA foray. But that’s not how things
turned out: Marshall will headline
PFL Europe 2 on June 8 when she faces Mirela
Vargas at Utilita Arena in Newcastle, England.
“It’s amazing for me, and I’m extremely grateful for the PFL to
give me this opportunity,” Marshall said on a media call. “I
remember a couple of months ago and they were talking about my
debut … And I just said, ‘Look, I don’t mind fighting abroad. I
don’t mind going on someone’s undercard.’ And they come back and
said, ‘Look, we’d like to take it in Newcastle.’
“I thought, ‘Wow, what an opportunity.’ If you’re going to do it, I
suppose then go big. I’ve headlined the Utilita Arena three or four
times as a boxer, and I’m absolutely buzzing to do it in my MMA
debut.”
Marshall is far from the first female fighter to make a crossover
from the Sweet Science to MMA. Former UFC champion Holly Holm
might be the most successful example, but Marshall also has a
ready-made rivalry with current PFL talent Claressa
Shields. While Marshall admits to watching Shields fight in the
cage, she hasn’t spent a lot of time focusing on others, such as
Amanda
Serrano and Heather
Hardy, who have followed a similar path.
“I haven’t really looked into that too much,” Marshall said.
“Obviously, I’ve seen Claressa … I’ve never really I haven’t really
taken anything from the other girls because everyone’s different.
Everyone adapts differently. So yeah, like I said it I could all I
could take from from Claressa’s fights, I can see how she struggled
with certain things.”
Marshall says that she has embraced the learning curve that
accompanies a transition to MMA. But as expected, it hasn’t been
easy.
“Training’s been really hard,” she said. “It’s been a massive
change, but one that I’ve enjoyed. I’ve actually enjoyed the
adjustments that I had to make from being a boxer.
“… Obviously, this is all, apart from the stand-up, this is all new
to me,” she added. “So it’s like I’ve got to cram in a lot of
basics in such a small time, and obviously these females in MMA
have been covering a lot of different disciplines for a long time.
So for me it’s just about getting the basics right and perfecting
them really.”
Ultimately, it is that new, unconquered horizon that convinced
Marshall to try her hand at a new combat sport. In some ways,
boxing just wasn’t providing the same thrill that it did earlier in
her fighting career.
“I’m really excited. To be honest, I’ve accomplished everything I
set out to accomplish in boxing,” she said. “All I wanted was to be
undisputed, to have all the belts and that’s what I’ve done. [It
had gotten to [where] I wouldn’t even get nervous anymore. which to
say nerves isn’t really a good thing, but this is new, it’s
exciting, it’s unknown, and it’s really got me pumped up. This is
something that I’ve been missing for quite a number of years in
boxing.”