Kaufman delighted with performance

Canadian MMA star Sarah Kaufman was delighted with her win over Takayo Hashi at the Strikeforce Challengers event last night in San Jose, California.

Kaufman became the first-ever Strikeforce 135-pound women’s champion.

“I’m really happy with my performance,” Kaufman told MMAjunkie.com.

“I really feel like I did execute my gameplan very well. I wasn’t able to finish the fight, but I was able to control the fight.”

Kaufman admitted that the fight was a clash of styles as Hashi wanted to bring the fight to the ground and did not want to suffer from the Canadian’s potent striking.

“I just knew that she wanted to go to the ground,” Kaufman said. “I’m actually really comfortable on the ground, but it’s obviously where she wants to be. I may as well take her on the feet, and she said she was going to stand with me.

“It was an interesting fight in that she was moving a lot, and it was really hard to catch her because she was constantly backing up and circling. Then I did know toward the end of the fight – the end of the third and into the fourth and the fifth – I could tell she was getting a little more tired and wanted to start trying to pull guard and get the fight on the ground. It was just one of those things.”
“Some of the times when I was throwing the right hand, I was throwing it more just to kind of keep it moving, keep relaxed, because I knew that she wasn’t going to be there,” Kaufman said. “I’m not going to throw it full force if I know I’m not actually going to be hitting her. It was more just to see how she was going to react – where she was going to feint to, where she was going to try and come back to.

“Not all of the punches were supposed to land.”