fell asleep last night so just watched. great fight, I had Frampton edging it. love the sportsmanship from two guys who earned each other's respect by coming out and giving their all.
Yea nothing like facing a guy who was clearly dominated by your most recent opponent that you dominated for 12 rounds (for the 3rd time). How compelling!
I've also never seen such blatant avoidance of an opponent from a camp as I'm seeing from Manny's camp about Crawford. Both his manager and trainer are straight up saying Crawford has a tough style for Manny and they don't want to match them up. Manny is supposed to be a top 5/10 p4p and his people are legitimately saying they don't want to fight someone bc they're too difficult?
yeah i have done a rare flame performance of arum on twitter for that. so damn annoying. i seriously don't get it. like what are they trying to do, milk manny's record for one more floyd fight? (sadly the answer may be yes!). just dumb to see, it should be about the legacy at this point. honestly i love crawford but i would probably ever so slightly favor manny, i think he still has the skills. could be wrong. tbf this could be more about arum hiding crawford from manny than vice versa i suppose
Tossed the Ward-Brand fight on. Didn't know anything about Brand, thought he'd be an undersized Barrera. Oops, no, he's an undersized awkward underpowered guy at this weight.
Took a call in the 2nd round and stayed on til the end, really boring fight, easy no risk win from Ward, did nothing better to prepare him for Kovalev that some decent sparring could've done instead.
It's possible Chilemba is more awkward than Ward, Kovalev is just so heavy handed I'm having trouble dogging him on a 50-50 fight. Will take Kovalev if the books give him odds.
50-50 last I checked on bovada. Really can't remember the last time such a big fight was truly 50-50. Vaguely remember Garcia -mattyshe being close. I'll prob stay away from betting I really have no idea. I'll be rooting for Kov and prob pulling trigger if +150 or better but I doubt it gets there
Agree with you, can't recall a recent big fight between 1 and 2 that was so close. Porter Thurman was close but not as big as this. Quillin Jacobs was also close, but similar to Porter Thurman not as big.
I agree that Arum is probably trying to keep Manny winning for one more big payday against Canelo, may weather or cotto and Crawford is too much s risk for too little upside.
I honestly don't have a clue about the kovalev fight. I don't think Ward has the power to really hurt Kovakev. Before the chilemba fight I would have assumed kovalev would eventually connect and take Ware out, but if chilemba can go the distance and dominate many of the middle and later rounds, no reason ward couldn't do the same winning a couple more rounds and win a decision IMO.
I am intrigued with a ward by decision bet if odds are good enough.
Kovalev sure needs to bring it more than he did against Chilemba, particularly conditioning wise.
I wouldn't say Chilemba dominated any rounds, but he clearly did win a few.
I like Kovalev by decision though on a bet at current odds, Ward doesn't throw a ton and I expect Kovalev to train harder for this fight, it's not going to be easy to have enough volume to outpoint a sharp Kovalev, he's not nearly as slick as Ward but Ward is not likely going to be able to hang in the pocket as long as he usually likes.
It doesn't look like the straight up winner bet nor Ward decision will be at great odds to me.
Not unexpected or anything but Chino Maidana just finally officially retired today. Hopefully he never comes back he took a lot of shots. I won't ever forget that Broner fight.
