Making Headway

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Luana Santos welcomes the resistance that comes with being an emerging contender.

The 24-year-old Brazilian will look to move another step closer to relevance in the Ultimate Fighting Championship women’s flyweight division when she serves as a short-notice replacement for Tereza Bleda and faces Casey O’Neill as part of the UFC 305 undercard this Saturday at the RAC Arena in Perth, Australia. Neither of them can afford a hiccup at this stage of their development. O’Neill, a Scotland native who grew up in Australia, enters the cage on the heels of back-to-back defeats to former Invicta Fighting Championships titleholder Jennifer Maia and onetime Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki champion Ariane Lipski.

“I think it will be a very interesting clash,” Santos told Sherdog.com. “We’re both hungry for a win. I want to be ranked, and she wants to get back to winning since she’s coming off two losses. She’s super complete. There are gaps in her game, of course, and I’ll work to exploit them. She’s a warrior, and she likes to move forward. Especially with this card being in Australia, I know she’ll want to put on a show. She’ll show up with determination.”

O’Neill started her UFC with four consecutive victories, three of them finishes, and pushed her overall record to 9-0 ahead of her ill-fated encounter with Maia. Some eight months have passed since she submitted to an armbar from Lipski in the second round of their UFC 296 pairing in December.

“She’s under a type of pressure that I don’t feel,” Santos said. “She doesn’t want to be unranked. She doesn’t want to lose to a third Brazilian in a row [after Maia and Lipski]. I believe we’ll have a war. I’m counting on it, with all respect. It’s a fight I wanted. The universe heard me. I can hardly wait.”

Santos has shifted her base of operations to the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas, where coaches Allan Begosso and Rafael Domingos oversee her training. “I’m further perfecting weapons we already had from earlier fights,” she said. Santos has rattled off five straight wins, marking herself as a person of interest at 125 pounds. She last fought at UFC on ESPN 59, where she submitted Mariya Agapova with a rear-naked choke in the first round of their July 13 clash.

“My plans are in motion,” Santos said. “I wrote down on my notepad that I would be ranked before the end of this year. God is hearing me. I have a chance to be ranked this August, and I’d like to be fighting someone ranked above me in December. I can guarantee that I’ll be putting on a show in this next fight.”