Jackie Nava of Mexico, the holder of the WBC interim title at super bantamweight,  and her Argentinian challenger, María del Carmen Potenza, won’t step into the ring in the Palenque de la Feria in Aguascalientes until later on this evening, but the psychological warfare between the two women has been raging now for days.

Potenza, who is said to have predicted earlier in the week that she would knock out the Mexican, told her at Friday’s press conference: “I know all about you and how to beat you. You know nothing about me.”

“That may be true,” replied Nava. “The one thing I would point out, though, is that it’s very hard to vie with a Mexican in terms of heart – and I have heart to spare.”

Potenza has, in fact, yet to score a knockout in her professional career and seemed more concerned in another interview as to whether or not she’d get a fair crack of the whip from the judges. Having said that, she hit Claudia ‘La Chica Diez’ López so hard when the two disputed the UBC championship last year that the woman from Trelew, as she recounted later, was dazed for several rounds.

Nava, who tops WBAN’s computerized rankings and weighed in at 122 pounds yesterday to her challenger’s 121, snorted in derision when told that Potenza was predicting she would knock her out and fly home with her belt: “She can say what she likes. The last opponent I knocked out said exactly the same thing.”