{"id":5312,"date":"2025-07-19T07:44:43","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T07:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/5312\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T07:44:43","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T07:44:43","slug":"pfl-africa-dakota-ditcheva-says-lack-of-challengers-has-been-difficult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/5312\/","title":{"rendered":"PFL Africa: Dakota Ditcheva says lack of challengers has been ‘difficult’"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Dakota Ditcheva became the first British woman to win an MMA world title, she had no idea of the frustration that would follow.<\/p>\n

After the 26-year-old’s historic win over Taila Santos<\/a> in the PFL flyweight final – her fourth victory in a golden 2024 – she had all the momentum.<\/p>\n

Congratulations poured in from icons of women’s MMA, including Amanda Nunes, Cris Cyborg and Joanna Jedrzejczyk, but soon the narrative would develop.<\/p>\n

The question starting to form on everybody’s lips after that career-high moment in November was “what’s next?”.<\/p>\n

Ditcheva was ready to fight anyone, but the dominant way in which she had dispatched her opponents – including three first-round stoppages and one in the second round – meant there were no worthy challengers left in the promotion.<\/p>\n

“Obviously, with me walking through them last year it’s made it difficult,” Ditcheva tells BBC Sport.<\/p>\n

“It’s definitely frustrating. I did so well last year – I fought in the cage four times and obviously the last one was a big one and drew a lot of attention, but now I felt like my momentum had kind of dropped off.<\/p>\n

“Santos was the top girl in the division and the fact I walked through her so easily is another thing which made this year so difficult. They [the PFL] didn’t know which direction to put me in.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Dakota Ditcheva became the first British woman to win an MMA world title, she had no idea…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85],"class_list":["post-5312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}