Two top Ultimate Fighting Championship flyweight
contenders will get their names on the marquee unexpectedly.
On Thursday night, news broke that Marlon Vera
vs. Cory
Sandhagen had been shifted to
UFC on ESPN 43 in March, leaving
UFC Fight Night 219 with no headliner. The anticipated co-main
event of Taila
Santos (19-2) vs. Erin
Blanchfield (10-1) for that Feb. 18 event at the UFC Apex in
Las Vegas has been elevated to the headliner slot, with this
announcement
coming via the UFC on Friday. The two flyweights will now be
fighting across five rounds instead of three atop the billing.
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Santos suffered her first defeat in a few years when she came up
just short against champ Valentina
Shevchenko in June 2022 – in a fight that
several media scorers scored the fight for Santos. The loss
snapped a four-fight win streak, where she topped Molly
McCann, Gillian
Robertson, Roxanne
Modafferi and Joanne Wood
in the span of about 16 months. The Brazilian made her way to the
promotion through the Brazilian season of Dana White’s Contender Series, amassing a
spotless record of 15-0 with 12 finishes before making her UFC
debut.
Rising star Blanchfield surged into her 2021 promotional debut by
competing in the Cage Fury Fighting Championships and Invicta Fighting Championships organizations,
stringing together six wins opposite a single contentious defeat to
future UFC talent Tracy
Cortez. “Cold Blooded” lumped up Sarah Alpar
in 2021, and came back less than two months later to beat Miranda
Maverick. Her 2022 campaign went even better, as she tapped
J.J.
Aldrich and McCann to claim a place among the elite of the
flyweight division.
UFC Fight Night 219 will carry on at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas on
March 19, with its aforementioned Santos-Blanchfield headliner in
tow. The new co-main attraction will presumably be a light
heavyweight collision between Ovince St.
Preux and Philipe
Lins. Other matches featured on the main card include a
lightweight scrap pitting Jim Miller
against Gabriel
Benitez, a bantamweight battle between Mayra
Bueno Silva and Lina
Lansberg and a 205-pound encounter of William
Knight vs. Marcin
Prachnio.