Savannah Marshall is preparing to make her MMA debut in 4 weeks đź‘€#PFLNewcastle | Saturday 8th June | Utilita Arena, Newcastle | Tickets on sale now! đź”— Biography | Live streaming on DAZN pic.twitter.com/JD50b8958U
— PFL Europe (@PFLEurope)
May 13, 2024
Savannah Marshall didn’t necessarily expect her professional mixed martial arts debut to be on such a big stage.
Her signing with the Professional Fighters League was met with some fanfare because of her background as a boxing champion. But Marshall would have paid her dues on the undercard of her first foray into MMA. However, things were not like that. Martial will headline PFL Europe 2 against Mirela Vargas on June 8th at the Utilita Arena in Newcastle, England.
“This is amazing to me and I’m very grateful to the PFL for giving me this opportunity,” Marshall said on a media conference call. “I remember a few months ago, they were talking about my debut…and I just said, ‘Look, I don’t mind fighting overseas’ on someone’s undercard. I don’t mind coming out. ‘And they came back and said, ‘Look, we want to do it in Newcastle.’
“I thought, ‘Wow, what an opportunity.’ I think if you’re going to do it, you should do it on a big scale. I’ve headlined the Utilita Arena three or four times as a boxer, and to be able to do that in my MMA debut was great. I’m really excited about it.”
Marshall isn’t the first female fighter to cross over from the sweet sciences to MMA. While former UFC champion Holly Holm may be her most successful example, Marshall is also lining up a rivalry with current PFL talent Claressa Shields. She admits that Marshall has seen Shields fight in the cage, but she prefers to focus on other fighters who have followed a similar path, such as Amanda Serrano and Heather Hardy. I haven’t spent much time on it.
“We haven’t looked into that too much,” Marshall said. “Of course I’ve seen Claressa…I’ve never really seen it. I’ve never really received anything from the other girls because everyone is different. Everybody adapts differently. Well, like I said, if I take as much as I can from Claressa’s fight, I can see how she was struggling with certain things.
Marshall said he has embraced the learning curve that comes with the transition to MMA. But as expected, it wasn’t easy.
“Training was really tough,” she said. “It was a big change, but I really enjoyed it. I’ve actually enjoyed the adjustment as a boxer.
“…Obviously, other than stand-up, this is all new to me,” she added. “So I feel like you have to cram in a lot of basics in such a short amount of time, and obviously women in MMA have been covering a lot of different disciplines for a long time. So it’s important for me to get the basics right. It’s about getting them right and really perfecting them.”
Ultimately, it was these new unconquered horizons that convinced Marshall to try a new martial art. In some ways, boxing hasn’t provided the same thrills as it did in her early days as a fighter.
“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 and win all the belts, and that’s what I did. [It
had gotten to [where] I don’t feel nervous anymore. It’s not really good to be nervous, but this is new, exciting, unknown and I’m really excited. This is something I have missed in the boxing world for many years. ”
