A disgusted Steve Erceg has vowed to right his faltering UFC career when he faces Alex Perez in Las Vegas in August, the Australian having declared his most recent defeat by former flyweight champion Brandon Moreno as the worst fight of his career.
Erceg will step back inside the Octagon desperate to snap a three-fight skid, having only 13 months ago fought for the flyweight world title. But a loss to champion Alexandre Pantoja, before defeats by both Kai Kara-France and Moreno, really stripped the momentum out of Erceg’s impressive early UFC work.
But it is the loss to Moreno with which he is most disappointed.
“I think it was the worst fight I’ve ever had in my life,” Erceg told ESPN.
“I never really even fought. It was just like I was trying to be too technical. I genuinely did think at the time that I might have been up [on the scorecards] because I felt like he wasn’t really landing anything and I’m landing my jab over and over again.
“But I’ve never fought like that in my life. I’ve never gone in and gone, oh, I think I’m just going to see if I can outpoint him here. Yeah, I’m disgusted with myself, basically.”
Asked what he put that performance down to, Erceg acknowledged the defeat by Kara-France may have taken a greater toll than he realised, as the thought of that first-round knockout popped back into his mind as he went to work on Moreno.
“I think there was a multitude of factors, but I think obviously getting knocked out of my last fight [didn’t help],” he said. “But a few different things led to me not going in thinking that’s how I was going to fight, but at the time obviously led to me fighting like that. And yeah, I didn’t like it.
“I thought I was over it [the knockout] at the time and then none of Moreno’s shots rocked me or anything, but he hit me with a harder shot and I went, ‘oh, it would be embarrassing to get knocked out two fights in a row’. And then I think that might’ve stuck with me a little bit.
“And at the end of the day, it was more embarrassing losing the way I lost to Moreno than it was losing the way I lost to Kai, if that makes sense. So I don’t ever want to feel like I went into a fight and didn’t fight ever again.”
A fight with Perez rates an easier assignment than any of Erceg’s past three opponents, at least according to ESPN’s flyweight rankings, though the Australian believes that could also be part of the problem – that he was looking at each of Pantoja, Kara-France and Moreno from the wrong perspective.
“I think the fact that they were such good guys, I was respecting them a little bit too much,” Erceg said.
“There’s been moments in the fight where usually I’d be like starting to push and go ‘I can see he’s tired or this or that’. And I thought, ‘oh, it is Moreno though, he might be baiting me into something’.
“And I think I’ve been giving them too much respect and I’ve been expecting more from them. I’ve been expecting almost like they have something that I haven’t seen before. And as it turns out, they’re human and they know all the same things that I know.
“And there’s nothing special there, so I am going to go out and treat them like anybody else and do my thing.”
With a clear picture of what he needs to do against Perez, and a mindset shift so that he does not beat himself, Erceg is confident he will turn things around at the UFC Apex in August.
“He’s a very good wrestler, but he doesn’t seem to use it very much except for defensively,” Erceg told ESPN. “And he likes to blitz with his striking a lot. And he does throw off angle, he does throw hard shots, he does throw longer combos, so it’s a dangerous fighter again.
“He’s basically only lost to the really good guys in the division. So, I need to make sure we’re on it. I want to go out here and prove to everybody and myself that I’ve still got what it takes… I’m sick of going in there with these guys and competing well but coming off second best.
“Obviously, I want to, but I really plan on going in there and being like ‘I’m the big dog now’, let’s put all this s— behind me and move on’.”
