Macklin sees Sturm stopping Murray

By Scott Gilfoid: It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand that Britain’s Martin Murray (23-0, 10 KO’s) is out of his depth in his December 2nd world title fight against WBA Super World middleweight champion Felix Sturm (36-2-1, 15 KO’s) when they go at it at the SAP-Arena in Mannheim, Germany.

Sturm, 32, is still young despite a long 10 year career that has seen him hold the WBA belt off and on for the past six years. Sturm is vulnerable as heck, but Murray, 29, isn’t the fighter to take advantage of Sturm’s weaknesses.

Even Murray’s fellow countryman Matthew Macklin isn’t giving him much of a chance and is reportedly picking Sturm by a KO by the halfway point in the fight. Who better to know how good Sturm is than Macklin, who fought Sturm and was beaten by him in a 12 round split decision last June after Macklin completely ran out of gas in the second half of the fight.

Although some boxing fans saw it as a Macklin win, I’ve seen the fight now 10 times and have scored it 8 rounds to 4 each time for Sturm. Macklin resembled amateur four-round fighter in that bout, and did remarkably well for the first four rounds.

However, after the 4th round, Macklin was running on fumes and had nothing on his shots from then on. He continued to throw a lot of punches but his arms were like wet spaghetti and he zero power. Sturm was then able to jab him at will and connect with hard power shots to dominate the fight from the 5th round on.

I just don’t know what to say about Murray. I’ve seen him fight so many times and he just doesn’t impress me. He’s only fought one halfway decent fighter during his career in Nick Blackwell.

Murray, ranked #3 by the World Boxing Association, hasn’t fought any world class contenders or champions thus far. There obviously needs to be a change made by the sanctioning bodies to require title challengers to at least have beaten one or preferably at least two high qualities world class contenders before they’re given a shot at a world title.

We’re going to see a perfect example of this argument on December 2nd when Murray gets taken apart by Sturm in a one-sided loss.

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