Viloria decisions Soto

By Matt Stein: Making his first fight back since being stopped in the 12th round in his last fight, former International Boxing Federation (IBF) light flyweight champion Brian Viloria (27-3, 15 KO’s) won a very questionable 10 round split decision victory over Mexican Omar Soto (19-7-2, 13 KO’s) on Saturday night at the Yñares Sports Arena, in Pasig City, Metro Manila, Philippines.

Viloria, 29, looked totally gassed out after the 5th round and took terrible punishment in the 2nd half of the fight. At best, I think the fight should have been ruled a draw. But in reality, I think Soto, 30, did more than enough to get the win. He landed the harder shots in the fight and gave Viloria a real beating in the last five rounds of the fight.

Viloria looked good in rounds one through five, landing fast shots and doing a decent job of out-working the slower Soto. But it seems like Viloria hit the wall at the midpoint of the fight with his stamina giving out almost entirely. It was like watching two different fighters in the ring. This is exactly what happened in Viloria’s last fight before this against Carlos Tamara last January.

Viloria looked great in the first half of the fight and then ran out of gas in the last part of the fight and took a real beating. However, in that fight, Viloria fought well until the 8th round when he started to show signs of fatigue. This time, Viloria ran out of gas much quicker and took a lot of punishment because of it. This was an opponent that Viloria should have been able to beat without any problems if he had his act together. Before this fight, Soto had been beaten by fighters like Omar Andres Narvaez, Gilberto Keb Baas, Cesar Seda, Muhammad Rachman, Jose Lopez and Juan Carlos Perez.

It’s not a good sign that Viloria is struggling against a fighter that was dominated by other guys. Viloria may need to look at figuring out how to fix his conditioning problem. It require that he move up in weight to the super flyweight division. However, I think Viloria would have big problems against fighters like Narvaez and Vic Darchinyan and I think he’d probably get knocked out again.

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