With LFA 81 win, Vince Cachero plans to be in the UFC before end of the year

Following a disappointing 2019 that saw him lose back to back fights for the first time in his career, bantamweight Vince Cachero was looking to rebound in his first bout of 2020 on January 31 versus Marvin Garcia at LFA 81.

Having learned lessons from his previous losses, Cachero was able to rebound against Garcia and pick up a second-round TKO win to get himself back on track, which he hopes leads to the UFC by year’s end.

“I thought it was a great fight for me,” Cachero told MMAWeekly.com. “Marvin is a tough veteran of this sport. I thought it was a perfect fight to show off all the improvements we’ve made since the last (loss to Liudvik Sholinian).

“The last one I had a wrestler stay on top of me, and it was a controversial split-decision loss for me, but we made a bunch of adjustments in camp to make sure that doesn’t happen again, and we proved it in this fight.”

For Cachero, the close loss to Sholinian has been the kind of motivator he needed to make 2020 his strongest year yet.

“Yeah that pisses me off and fuels my fire,” said Cachero. “It was my fault for letting it get to the judges, it shouldn’t have gone there.

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“That still sticks with me and is a chip on my shoulder, but at the same time I do take the mentality of being able to learn from that loss and work on the holes we had so they don’t end up happening again.”

Having hovered close to making a move up to the biggest stage of MMA, Cachero is looking to finally take that step in 2020, no matter what it takes to get there.

“I’m always trying to focus on the next fight, but the goal for this year is to get into the UFC,” Cachero said. “Whatever we need to do to make that happen, whatever fights we have to set up to make that happen I’ll focus on that and we’ll see what happens.

“Whether it’s the LFA or (Dana White’s) Contender Series I’m going to be fighting a beast regardless, and I’ll be excited for that fight knowing all I need to do is keep winning. All I can do is control what I do: and that’s to keep winning and keep finishing fights.”