UFC 221, which is scheduled to take place in Perth, Western Australia on February 11th, might be about to get a second title bout, as Cris ‘Cyborg’ Justino claims she has agreed to fight Invicta FC featherweight champion Megan Anderson at the event.
Justino is only days removed from a taxing five-round unanimous decision win over former UFC bantamweight queen Holly Holm at UFC 219, but the Brazilian just revealed on Instagram that she recently received a call proposing she jump straight back into the fray.
“I got a call asking if I would fight [Megan Anderson] in her home country and I said Yes,” wrote the 32-year-old veteran.
Anderson is the opponent that ‘Cyborg’ requested in her post-fight interview with Joe Rogan at UFC 219 and again in a social media post a few hours later. Justino also mentioned that she’d like to travel down under for the fight.
The 27-year-old Anderson is a native of Gold Coast in Queensland, on the opposite side of Australia to Perth. She hasn’t fought in her homeland since December of 2014, however.
The dangerous, rangey, six-footer has won four straight since a submission defeat to the highly-rated Cindy Dandois in September of 2015. All four of those wins have come via KO/TKO. She claimed the Invicta FC interim featherweight title with a TKO win over Charmaine Tweet in her last outing in January 2017 but was later promoted to full championship status when ‘Cyborg’ vacated the undisputed strap in March.
Anderson was scheduled to face ‘Cyborg’ at UFC 214 in July but she withdrew from the fight for “pressing personal reasons” that she said in a Facebook post were out of her control. Justino went on to face the tough Tonya Evinger instead and picked up the vacant UFC women’s featherweight strap with a third-round TKO win.
Anderson has been campaigning to get the fight rescheduled ever since, including via Twitter in the immediate aftermath of Justino’s win over Holm. Though nothing is official just yet, it looks like her wish is about to come true.
UFC 221 is headlined by a middleweight title fight between New Zealand-born, Australia-based Robert Whittaker and American Luke Rockhold. The fight was originally scheduled to be for the interim title that Whittaker secured with a decision win over Yoel Romero at UFC 213 in July, but ‘The Reaper’ was promoted to undisputed champ when Georges St-Pierre vacated the belt last month. Rockhold finished former two-weight WSOF titleholder David Branch via submission in his most recent outing at September’s UFC Fight Night 116. It was his first fight since losing the middleweight title to Michael Bisping via first-round KO the previous June.
Also featured on the card is southern hemisphere heavyweight hero Mark Hunt, who takes on surging once-beaten American Curtis Blaydes.
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