By Erik Schmidt: WIBF Women’s International Boxing Federation and Global Boxing Union Female super flyweight champion Alesia Graf (22-1, 9 KOs) defeated Magdalena Dahlen (9-1, 3 KOs) by a 10-round unanimous decision in a fight that turned out to be much tougher than expected on Saturday night at the Stadthalle, Rostock, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. The final judges’ scores were 99-91, 97-94 and 97-93.
Graf, 28, originally from Belarus and now fighting out of Germany narrowly won the first round with her fast combinations. However, Dahlen, from Poland also now living in Germany, landed the harder shots and put a lot of withering pressure on Graf in the round. She showed a lot of movement, jabbing and landing right hands to cause Graf to work hard in the round.
In the 2nd round, Dahlen unloaded on Graf with right hand shots and left hooks, walking through Graf’s jabs and overpowering her with big punches to the head. If there’s any weakness in Graf’s game, it’s her lack of power and she seemed to out of her element in the early going with the big power punches thrown by Dahlen.
The third round was close, with Dahlen continuing to land heavy shots to the head and body of Graf. Starting in the 4th round, Graf began to pull away from Dahlen, landing fast shots – labs and combinations – and outworking Dahlen in the round.
Dahlen was still loading up with her shots but throwing a lot less often that she had in the prior rounds of the fight. In the 5th round, Dahlen began to show signs of tiring out, her punch output dropping off significantly during the round. Graf took advantage of her lack of punches and began to rain shots on Dahlen from the outside and dominate the action.
In the 6th round, Graf controlled the round with her lab, hitting Dahlen over and over again with stinging jabs from the outside and staying out of range of her big wind up shots. Dahlen connected with several big shots in the 7th, causing Graf’s nose to bleed. Other than that, it was all Graf, who tagged Dahlen with a lot of hard one-two punches.
Dahlen landed a few hard combinations in the 8th round, but like in the previous round, she was badly outworked by Graf, who kept her under constant withering fire. In rounds nine and ten, it was all Graf, landing beautiful combinations and staying out of range of Dahlen’s big right hand punches.