Holyfield Loses To Valuev, Given Raw Deal

By Boxing News - 12/21/2008 - Comments

holy532242By Jim Dower: Proving how hard it is to sometimes take a title from a champion, former four-time heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield came up short last night in his attempt to capture a portion of the World Boxing Association (WBA) heavyweight title from champion Nikolay Valuev, losing by a 12-round majority decision in Switzerland in front of a large, 12,500, member Swiss crowd. Valuev, 35, despite appearing to lose a minimum of eight rounds, was given the decision by the three judges, who scored it 116-112, 115-114 and 114-114.

Based on the actual fight that I saw, the scores seem way out of touch with the actual fight that took place last night. Holyfield, 46, landed the harder punches in most of the round, and kept Valuev on the outside, unable to land with any great regularity, with constant movement.

Valuev looked confused for the most part with Holyfield’s movement, and threw few punches until the 7th round of the fight. Most of the time, Valuev followed after Holyfield, throwing a slow jab and having major difficulties with Holyfield’s constant change of directions around the ring.

Valuev, who fights his best when an opponent is directly in front of him, proved to be very limited in his ability to cut off the ring on Holyfield and found it hard to get in position to land his big, clubbing punches. Holyfield, hardly doing well himself in terms of offensive output, landed three to four good punches in every round which turned out to be enough to control the fight due to Valuev’s ineptness.

In the 7th, Valuev was finally able to land a couple of good right hands, but Holyfield was more than his equal in the round, and stood in front of Valuev for the first time, and tagged him back with a series of hard combinations to the head. The round was far and away the best round in the fight up to this point.

Doing little other than jabbing and landing two right hands, Valuev appeared to do well enough in the 8th to win the round. It wasn’t hardly impressive work for a heavyweight, in particular a heavyweight champion like Valuev, but it was good enough to take the round because Holyfield wad doing little other than moving around.

Indeed, the constant moving of Holyfield may well be the reason why he ended up losing the fight. European judges’ generally like for their fighters to mix it up more and score against fighters that move too much. In the case of Holyfield, he seemed at times to be running from battle, playing a game of stalling and keep away.

Though it was effective in preventing Valuev from landing his big punches, it seemed to keep Holyfield from winning over the judges at the end of the day. In remaining four rounds of the fight, Valuev was by far the more aggressor of the two, landing the bigger shots and looking more busy than Holyfield.

It looked as if Holyfield was still able to win 10th with a couple of hard right hands in the round. However, Valuev clearly was the better in the 11th and 12th rounds, due to Holyfield running too much and not standing his ground enough. In the end, I still had Holyfield winning by a comfortable margin. However, the judges’ seemed to be looking at things differently, perhaps unhappy with Holyfield’s reluctance to stand and trade with the huge Valuev.



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