Liz Carmouche, Juliana Velasquez Share Perspectives on Trilogy Bout at PFL 1

The stakes will be different, but the opponent will be familiar when Liz Carmouche and Juliana Velasquez square off at PFL 1 on Thursday night.

The flyweight rivals previously met twice in title bouts under the Bellator MMA banner. The first ended in controversial fashion, as Carmouche claimed the 125-pound belt with a fourth-round stoppage of Velasquez at Bellator 278. Velasquez, who was finished with elbows from the mounted crucifix, appealed the ruling on the grounds that none of the blows were significant enough to warrant a stoppage. That appeal was denied, and Carmouche retained the title in more emphatic fashion in the rematch, winning via second-round submission at Bellator 289.

Carmouche wasn’t especially excited to learn that Velasquez would be her first PFL regular season opponent, but she ultimately found the right mindset as she prepared for the trilogy.

“Initially I was disappointed,” Carmouche said during a media call on Wednesday. “You know, I wanted the challenge, I wanted something different, but then I saw it as an opportunity to face somebody who's probably going to come out there with an entirely different game plan. Somebody that's coming out because there's a $1 million on the line, who feels like the first two fights didn't really go her way, but she felt like she should have won them. She felt like the first one was controversial, and it was a bad call. The second one, she was just caught off her game but she was winning up until that point.

“So that tells me it's somebody that's willing to go out there and be super dangerous. And I can't rely on them to do the same things I’ve done before, which means you can't really create the game plan that you think you can. So you have to just be ready to make changes on the fly at every moment.”

Velasquez, meanwhile, isn’t putting too much stock into past meetings with Carmouche.

“Obviously we’ve faced each other before twice, but I feel like this is a completely different fight and I’m treating her as a new opponent. It’s been over a year since we fought,” Velasquez said through a translator.

“It's at a new promotion that's under a new rule set. And we've developed over the past year. Plus we haven’t faced each other and tested ourselves against each other. So I’m looking at it from that angle.”

While Velasquez was unhappy with the result of their first meeting, that altered her approach in a negative way heading into the rematch. After taking more than a year away and giving birth to her daughter, the Brazilian believes she’s now in a better place mentally than she was then.

“I just feel like in the first fight there was an issue and a mistake on the referee’s front. That kind of trickled down to the following fight, where I came in with a sense of revenge, a sense of, I need to right those wrongs and get this one back,” Velasquez said. “And that's not really something that's constructive for me. I feel like I compete better and I'm a better person, a better fighter, when I'm happy and when I'm able to fight happy. So, end of last year, I had a daughter who’s putting a big smile on my face and is a big catalyst to my happiness.” Because of their history, Carmouche expects Velasquez to come out with nothing to lose on Thursday night in San Antonio.

“[It] means that she's gonna come out dangerous and take risks that she probably never would have taken in the first two [fights], especially to prove herself in a new organization,” Carmouche said. “So that's a really dangerous opponent that I have to be on my toes for.”