Paddy Pimblett may just have stamped his ticket to a shot at rising towards the summit of the UFC lightweight ladder.

The Liverpool man scored the biggest win of his mixed martial arts career at last month’s UFC 315 event in Florida, finishing the former 155-pound title challenger Michael Chandler by third round TKO to improve his career record to 23-3 (7-0 UFC).

The win moved Pimblett up to the 8th spot in the official UFC lightweight rankings picture, sandwiching him between Mateusz Gamrot and Beneil Dariush.

But with work still to be done to work his way into the conversation to fight the winner of next month’s clash between Ilia Topuria and Charles Oliveira to determine a new 155-pound champion following Islam Makhachev’s decision to relinquish his world title ahead of a move to welterweight.

And one man apparently willing to hand Pimblett an opportunity to rise up towards title contention is the division’s number one ranked fighter, Arman Tsarukyan.

“He looked pretty good in his last fight. Now we can say he can beat Top-10 fighters. He’s number 8 or something,” Tsarukyan said to Red Corner MMA, as noted by Sportbible.

“Maybe he wants to fight at the end of this year, but I want to fight this summer and the end of this year. I’ll take [this summer] that because he has a big name, he just beat Michael Chandler, and he has a six or seven [fight] win streak.

“He’s never lost in the UFC. It makes sense to get back and to get more fans from the UK.”

A win over Tsarukyan would without doubt accelerate Pimblett’s title ambitions. The Armenian is 9-2 in his UFC run so far, losing only in his (short notice) debut against Islam Makhachev and to Mateusz Gamrot three years ago.

He had worked his way back to a title shot with then-champ Makhachev following a split decision win over Charles Oliveira in April of last year but pulled out of their bout scheduled for last January citing a back injury sustained while cutting weight.