Injured star Valentina Shevchenko wrote her congratulations to Natalia Silva after she won the vacant flyweight title this past weekend, but it seems the new champion had a chilly response to ‘Bullet’ adding that she should, “keep the belt warm,” for her.
“First of all, thank you. It’s nice that she had time to watch the fight, right?” Silva told mmafighting when asked about ex-champ Shevchenko’s comments. “[Nice that you had time to] follow the division, to see what’s going on in the division.
“The first thing she already got wrong in that post was talking about how the belt is hers. ‘My belt. I’m going to get my belt.’ The belt isn’t hers anymore, the belt is mine. I’m the champion. I fought for this, I earned it, so I’m the champion now. And as far as keeping the belt warm, she doesn’t need to worry because I’m going to take very good care of it.
“There’s not much else to say to her, really. That’s it. The belt isn’t hers, the belt is mine, and I’m going to take good care of it.”
Not finished there, Silva’s response got even icier as she took at a dig at her rival for not defending the belt more often.
“Keep it warm, right? She wasn’t even keeping it warm herself. She would take a year between fights. She was fighting once a year, and now she’s talking about keeping the belt warm?”
That response certainly adds some extra spice to a potential title clash between the two once Shevchenko returns from her injury layoff, but with there currently being no timeline for that, Silva has made it clear she doesn’t intend to hang about waiting to defend the belt.
“I want to fight soon,” Silva said. “I don’t want to sit around. I like fighting. I haven’t gotten injured, I don’t get injured in my fights, so I want to take advantage of my youth, right? I want to fight more frequently. I believe that by the beginning of the year, in the first half of the year, I’ll already want to be fighting.”
“To be honest, I’m not worried about Valentina anymore,” she added. “I wanted to fight her because she was the champion, because she had what I wanted, she had the belt. Now, whether it’s her or someone else, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m the champion now, and I’m the one who has to defend the title.
“I don’t even have to think about Valentina. If she wants to fight when she comes back, and there isn’t another fight that needs to happen, we can fight, but we also have to look at the rankings and the queue because there are some girls who are doing really well and deserve to be fighting, you know?”
