By Aaron Klein: In a night of poor performances by British fighters, undefeated top ranked super featherweight contender Kevin Mitchell (27-0, 20 KOs) had a tough time in getting by the Colombian journeyman Walter Estrada (34-6, 23 KOs), taking a lot of punishment from him before dispatching him in the 5th round with a right to the body on Saturday night at the Boardwalk Hall, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Mitchell, 23, ranked #3 WBO, #4 in the IBF super featherweight division, was thought to have been able to get by a grizzled old veteran like Estrada with relative ease.
That wasn’t the case, however, as Estrada, 33, took the fight to Mitchell in the opening rounds hurting him with tremendous left hands. Estrada, a featherweight, showed that he was the much harder puncher of the two during the early action and had little trouble landing his straight left through the wide open guard of Mitchell. After the second round, in which Estrada stunned Mitchell on a number of occasions with straight left hands, Mitchell came on in the following rounds and took control of the fight with his hard shots to the body and much better work rate.
Still, it wasn’t good to see a fighter ranked as high as Mitchell, with some people – mostly British fans – feeling that he’s a can’t miss future champion in the super featherweight division. Against Estrada, Mitchell looked anything but a future champion and seemed lucky just to escape with the win over the C-class fighter. Mitchell developed a really bad swelling under his right eye by the 4th round, and it swelled up quickly looking in danger of closing if the fight had gone the full 12-round distance.
Thankfully for Mitchell, his power bailed him out in the 5th round when he landed a series of hard body shots in the round to drop Estrada to the canvas. After getting knocked down, Estrada got up at the count of eight, and looked ready to continue but the referee suddenly stopped the bout for some reason, even though Estrada looked perfectly fine. I had a feeling that the referee would prematurely stop the bout as he was giving Estrada the count while he was down, because the referee seemed poised to stop the bout, and when Estrada got up, the referee looked as if he had already made up his mind.
Of course, Estrada protested the stoppage and quite rightfully appeared angry long after the fight. I doubt that he would have won, but he had a point – the fight did seem to have been stopped much too early, taking away the small chance that Estrada would have had to win the bout. The thing of it was the stoppage occurred at the very end of the round, which meant that if the referee had allowed the fight to continue, Estrada would have been able to recover from the body shot in between rounds. It’s too bad, because with Estrada’s power, Mitchell’s lack of defense and less than solid chin, we may have seen an upset in the making in the following rounds.
As it is, Mitchell got the win but did little to impress many of the American boxing fans at ringside, a lot of which booed the premature stoppage. Mitchell, 23, looked good at times in the early going, especially when he was punching to the body. This is an area where he is quite effective, getting a lot of leverage in his shots and putting a lot of work in that area. For some reason, he doesn’t seem to be able to generate the same kind of power for his head shots, but he makes up for it by landing a high number of them. Estrada, however, a slow plodding fighter, found it Mitchell to his liking in the early going as he was constantly standing directly in front of him.
This allowed the 33 year-old Estrada to do what he does best, namely slug with high power. Mitchell much have been in shock in the first couple of rounds, because he was getting rocked often by Estrada, and there were moments in which it seemed unclear whether Mitchell would even make it out of the round without visiting the canvas. In fairness to Mitchell, however, Estrada is a very hard puncher, a harder thrower than even Carl Johanneson, who gave Mitchell all kinds of problems in their recent bout, which was ultimately won by Mitchell by a 9th round stoppage.
To his credit, Mitchell didn’t back down or try to avoid Estrada, instead he began focusing on landing big body shots. This seemed to take the fight out of Estrada in short order, putting him on the defense and not allowing him to load up on his left like he had in the first couple of rounds. He was still tagging Mitchell on occasion with big lefts, but it was much more infrequent than it was before. Estrada landed a huge left hand at the start of the 4th, but other than that, it was all Mitchell for the rest of the round as he took over with his devastating body attack.
Mitchell clearly has his work cut out for him if he plans on becoming a champion in the super featherweight division. There are a lot of fighters that I frankly feel that are better than him, starting with Pacquiao, Valero, Juan Manuel Marquez and Marco Antonio Barrera. This is just a short list of what I consider to be better fighters, because I believe that there’s a least a half dozen more than that who could beat him.
Ideally, Mitchell should go after the WBO champion Alex Arthur, who I think Mitchell could possibly beat if he gets lucky. However, I don’t like Mitchell’s chin and I see that being a problem for him even against Arthur, who would likely knock him out if they should meet.