On July 19, 2025, undefeated English fighter Dakota Ditcheva extended her perfect record to 15-0 with a dominant unanimous victory over Sumiko Inaba at the PFL Champions Series 2 in Cape Town, South Africa. But despite winning every round against one of the division’s top contenders, Ditcheva walked away deeply frustrated.
The win that disappointed her: How Dakota Ditcheva proved a point while falling short
The fight marked her return after an eight-month layoff, which made it especially meaningful. She had last fought in November 2024 when she defeated Taila Santos to claim the 2024 PFL world tournament title, cementing her status as the division’s most dominant force.
The chance to showcase her skills against Inaba, an undefeated fighter in her own right, presented an opportunity to silence doubters about whether Ditcheva could maintain her elite level of performance over extended periods. After all, she deserves knockouts so quickly.
What made Ditcheva’s disappointment particularly acute, however, was how her performance actually unfolded. In the first two rounds, she controlled Inaba with sharp striking and clinching that rooted in her strengths Muay Thai foundation. But it was the third round, the performance she delivered while battling a serious hand injury, that told the real story.
Ditcheva broke her left hand early in the third round after delivering a direct blow to Inaba’s head. Faced with the choice of relaxing or continuing to impose her will, she persevered, adjusting her game plan on the fly and even using throwing techniques she rarely uses, such as a spinning back kick. Despite the intense pain and limited ability to throw her primary weapon, she simply dominated the final five minutes.
In an exclusive interview with Tim Wheaton after the fight, Ditcheva explained her complex feelings about the performance:
It probably wasn’t my best performance. I wasn’t very happy with it. I was happy with my third lap, even though I broke my hand on that lap. I think I feel like I performed better later than I did in the first two rounds. It showed a lot, you know, it showed that I can make it to three rounds, which a lot of people have always wondered if I can last that long, if I can continue to perform the way I’m doing over an extended period of time.
“So that showed it a little bit and then I had to show a little bit of my game and a little bit of adversity, I think, with the fact that I can fight through injuries and not just here to look pretty.
That third round proved what she had been saying all along: she has the conditioning, fight IQ and mental strength to perform at an elite level even after the first few minutes. The damage she sustained in all three rounds was so severe that Inaba never seriously threatened her, and the judges scored it 30-27, 30-27, 30-27. Few fighters, regardless of division, maintain that level of control while injured.
After finally falling out after eight months out, Ditcheva now had to spend months recovering from surgery. The severity of the hand injury became even more apparent in the weeks that followed. What initially seemed like a repairable rift turned into something more complicated, ultimately forcing Ditcheva to withdraw from her scheduled fight at PFL Dubai in late December 2025, just five months after the Inaba fight.
In a statement released on December 24, she described herself as “truly heartbroken” about the withdrawal, having spent months in rehabilitation only to find that the injury required further intervention. The setback meant that her momentum from the dominant performance, despite her own reservations about it, would have to wait.
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