When it comes to her first round loss to Maycee Barber at LFA 14 in June, strawweight Itzel Esquivel acknowledges that she had tunnel vision in the bout and contributed quite a bit to her loss.
In particular, Esquivel was so set on ending the fight that she put herself in a lot of bad spots that she couldn’t work her way out of.
“I honestly could have done better,” Esquivel told MMAWeekly.com. “I feel like in the fight I was very focused on finishing quickly and didn’t stick to the game plan we had initially thought of. I think that’s what ended up really going my way.
“I was so focused on finishing quick that I got put in positions that I didn’t want to be in. It’s definitely a learning experience and has really helped me work on a lot of things for my upcoming fight.”
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In addition to working on what went wrong in her bout against Barber, Esquivel has spent the five months since then further developing her game.
“I have been working on new things, and I feel like I have been working on better at the things I’m good at,” said Esquivel. “I tried to fix a lot of things that went wrong in the past fight, so I did work a lot on that. But I think both things have been improved in my fight game.”
Esquivel (2-1) will look to rebound when she takes on Nicolle Caliari (3-1) in a main card 115-pound bout at LFA 26 on Friday in Houston.
“I feel like she’s a very strong girl,” Esquivel said of Caliari. “She is also very aggressive going forward. She likes to pressure a lot. She has a very frontal Muay Thai style. I think my movement is what is going to get the angles around her and stuff like that.”
Heading into her fourth fight of 2017, Esquivel would like to maintain the same level of output in 2018 and eventually work her way up to the next step in her career.
“I like to keep myself busy with a lot of fights throughout the year,” said Esquivel. “But it all depends on how I’m feeling, so we’ll see. The ultimate goal is to get into the UFC, so with every fight that I take, I think that I just have to perform well to get to the ultimate goal.”
