LONDON – After four fights in the UFC, Molly McCann is starting to feel at home inside the octagon. But she admits she needs to defeat Ashlee Evans-Smith to fully establish her place among the top competitors in the flyweight division.
Thursday, MMA Junkie sat down with McCann (10-2 MMA, 3-1 UFC) ahead of her UFC on ESPN+ 29 matchup March 21 at The O2 and found that, despite having her feet firmly on the floor, McCann’s dreams are sky high as she makes strides toward achieving them.
“I didn’t even wear my UFC gloves, or UFC kit, until I had won in the UFC,” McCann said. “I just didn’t feel as if I was allowed. I didn’t feel I had earned it. The first win in America, because I was such an underdog when I won that fight, I felt, ‘All right, I do deserve this.’ It’s because I’m a smart, intelligent fighter, as well as someone who will take the fight by the scruff of the neck if I need to.”
McCann, the former Cage Warriors flyweight champion, lost her octagon debut in her hometown of Liverpool, England, back in 2018, but since then has gone on a tear, claiming a hat trick of victories with increasingly impressive performances. Now the 29-year-old says she feels she belongs at the top level, but knows that she needs to defeat Evans-Smith (6-4 MMA, 3-4 UFC) to make the leap from prospect to ranked contender.
“This is the last fight that I think I have to have until I can really be confident and be like, ‘I’m going to absolutely murder everyone in the top 10,’” she explained. “It’s that grappler and striker fight again. This is like my graduation. I believe I’ve been set up (for success), I’m doing everything right. The blueprint’s there now. My grappling, my wrestling, my jiu jitsu, my ground and pound, is on par with hers. And once I’ve done this then there’s no questions. All questions are answered.”
McCann sees parallels in her situation with that experienced by her fellow Liverpool native Darren Till, whose wrestling and ground game were called into question by some pundits heading into his middleweight debut with Kelvin Gastelum, pundits who were no doubt surprised when Till took a unanimous decision in their UFC 244 tilt.
“Darren’s proved his wrestling, his jiu jitsu, he’s proved it all,” said McCann. “But still, it was getting asked of him because he’d had those two losses. So I feel like it’s just the same for me. I feel like you just have to prove it and it’ll all be forgotten about. People probably won’t make as much of it as I do, but I think I know that I need to do that just to be like, ‘Shhhhhh!’ You know what I mean?”
Like any up-and-coming MMA fighter, McCann’s dream is to one day capture championship gold, but she knows there’s a process involved, and that continues at UFC London in March, where a victory over Evans-Smith could push her up towards the flyweight division’s big names. She says she’s ready to make that jump.
“I just want to be a contender, come the end of the year, for the belt,” she said. “I’ll fight wherever, I’ll fight whoever it needs to be, to make that happen, and I’ve got the onions to do it now.
“I shock myself a lot when I get in there, and you’ll see after the first round my opponents go back to that seat and they’re sat there and they’re like, ‘Oh my (expletive) god, I’ve got to go back out there and fight this!’ and I’m like, ‘They’re not the monster that I thought they were going to be.’ I know this is where I’m at now, and I know, once you’ve felt someone out for that first minute, I’m good to go.”
If her quest for a UFC title may be a long-term plan, a slightly more immediate target – the opportunity to return to Liverpool and score a win in front of her hometown fans – is one that brought out the goosebumps as soon as she was asked about it.
“Ah! Goosies!” she grinned. “I’ve put out to the universe in my plan, and something that I say every day, I will fight again at the… it was the Echo Arena, now it’s the M&S Bank (Arena) now. I would love the UFC to come back. And if Darren doesn’t take it to Anfield, I’m not running before I can walk, because I need to be a co-main, I need to be ranked, I need to do what I need to do to bring it back (to Liverpool). But that’s something that’s in my dreams and that’s what I want to do.”
McCann even had a couple of potential matchups in mind for a future return to Merseyside, with a pair of flyweight bouts that could capture the imagination of fight fans both in her hometown and around the world.
“I would love to fight a Maycee Barber in Liverpool, I would love to fight a Joanne Calderwood in Liverpool, and I know every demographic would pay to watch those kinds of fights,” she said. “You know, we’re just going in and it’s not going to be, ‘Let’s touch for points and just edge it.’ We’re going in to five rounds, mass destruction. So, yeah. That’s on my bucket list.”
Molly McCann ready for her MMA 'graduation' at UFC on ESPN+ 29: 'The blueprint's there now'
