By Sean McDaniel: Making his first defense of his British super featherweight title champion Gary Buckland defeated challenger Paul Truscott by a one-sided 12 round unanimous decision on Saturday night at the Ponds Forge Arena, Sheffield, Yorkshire, UK.
The final judges’ scores were 119-109, 120-108 and 118-110. Buck, 25, wants to go after the European super featherweight champion Ermano Fegatilli next.
This is fight that really needed to be stopped like in the fifth or sixth rounds, as the 5’9″ Truscott was so far out of his league in this fight that it wasn’t even funny. He took a real beating from “Dynamo” Buckland and was never competitive for an instant. To begin with, Truscott couldn’t keep the shroter 5’7″ Buckland on the outside. He was continuously crowded and pounded on the inside by Buckland. Instead of moving around like most taller fighters do to keep away from shorter fighters, Truscott stood in place and tried to fight Buckland off the ropes.
It was pretty clear after a couple of rounds that this tactic wasn’t going to work, yet Truscott never made any real changes to his game plan. One easy thing he could have done would have been to tie Buckland up on the inside but he didn’t do this either. He didn’t move, he didn’t tie him up and didn’t throw many uppercuts. Truscott had an uppercut in his arsenal but he couldn’t throw it with any power and Buckland was able to easily take the few that Truscott did throw.
Buckland pounded Truscott in the 1st and 2nd rounds throwing a lot of uppercuts and hooks on the inside. In the 2nd round, Buckland landed a scorching right hand that sent Truscott flying to the ropes, which held him up from falling. The referee should have scored that as a knockdown. However, it didn’t matter in the large scheme of things because Buckland easily won the fight. Buckland later on knocked Truscott to the canvas with a right uppercut in the 10th round.
The fight was just really one-sided in every round with Buckland immediately getting inside on Truscott and just pulverizing him with never-ending shots. Buckland throw close to 900 punches in the fight and his connect percentage was high because he spent most of the fight on the inside hitting a stationary target. I still don’t know why Truscott’s trainer didn’t stop the fight because I personally feel that Truscott didn’t gain anything by soaking up one-way punishment for 12 rounds when he clearly wasn’t in the fight. He had no chance and was just taking shots. Truscott really didn’t fight with any real enthusiasm until the 12th round, when he came alive briefly and connected with a few big shots that seemed to stop Buckland in his tracks. It’s too bad Truscott didn’t fight like that earlier because as good as Buckland is, he’s still beatable as we saw in his 11th round stoppage loss to John Murray in May 2010.
In other action on the card:
Bradley Pryce PTS 10 Patrick Mendy
Richard Towers TKO 5 Harold Sconiers
Sergey Rabchenko KO 1 Ronny Gabel
Adam Etches TKO 3 Stilian Kostov