UFC on FOX 22 results: Leslie Smith tees off, upsets Irene Aldana

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – At the referee’s signal, Leslie Smith came forward at the start of the first round of her bout with Irene Aldana – and kept coming forward for almost the entire three rounds.

The result was an upset unanimous-decision win for Smith (9-7-1 MMA, 3-3 UFC), who dropped Aldana (7-3 MMA, 0-1 UFC) early and kept the pressure on her throughout, but couldn’t but her resilient opponent away.

The women’s bantamweight bout was part of today’s UFC on FOX 22 preliminary card at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, Calif. It aired on FS1 following early prelims on UFC Fight Pass and ahead of the FOX-televised main card.

The story of this fight for Smith was pure aggression. She charged through Aldana’s strikes in the opening moments of the fight, forcing her into a permanent backpedal and corralling her into the fence with her nonstop forward movement.

That led to an early opportunity when Aldana circled directly into a Smith right hand. Smith pounced on her fallen foe with a torrent of punches, but Aldana gamely battled back to her feet and managed to survive the round. In the next frame, she even put forth some offense of her own in a few brief flurries, but it wasn’t enough to stop Smith’s advance.

That became the pattern as the fight entered the final round. While Aldana showed off some sharp hands when she managed to move forward, Smith’s solid chin and unrelenting pressure limited those opportunities and kept Aldana in a perpetual circling motion, too busy avoiding the assault to launch a meaningful one of her own.

While Aldana managed to make it somewhat close with a takedown in the final minute, Smith controlled the bulk of the fight and landed the more significant blows, all of which convinced the judges to give her the win with scores of 29-28, 29-28, and 30-27.

Smith’s victory is her first since a TKO loss to Cristian Justino in May. Aldana’s loss in her UFC debut snaps a two-fight winning streak outside the organization.

Up-to-the-minute UFC on FOX 22 results include:

For complete coverage of UFC on FOX 22, check out the UFC Events section of the site.

(MMAjunkie’s John Morgan and Steven Marrocco contributed to this report from on site in Sacramento.)