By Scott Gilfoid: I wasn’t all that impressed with WBA World middleweight champion Felix Sturm’s 9th round TKO win over #5 WBO Sebastian Zbik (30-2, 10 KO’s) on Saturday night at the Lanxess Arena in Cologne, Germany. You could have pretty much put anyone in there with Zbik tonight and they would have beat the guy because he was completely gassed out by the 6th round.

It was just like Zbik’s last fight against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. last June in which Zbik started well, and then gassed out after only six rounds. Chavez Jr. then dominated him in the last half of the fight.

Tonight, it was like Déjà vu, except instead of Zbik dealing with a fighter that was unloading mostly power shots with his fight against Chavez Jr., Zbik was getting beaten up by Sturm’s jabs in the 2nd half. Zbik was getting royally clobbered by Sturm’s jabs and he simply didn’t have the stamina – or the power – to stand in there with him and really give it to him in the way that he needed to in order to win the fight.

In the 7th and 8th rounds, Zbik’s face and eyes started swelling up from the jabs he was getting pelted with. He looked almost delirious at the end of the 8th round from some hard jabs and hooks he ate. They might as well have stopped the fight then because Zbik had nothing left in the gas tank. In the 9th, Zbik was hit with jab after jab from Sturm. And in the last 20 seconds of the round, Sturm pulled his Arthur Abraham move by opening up with a flurry of shots tha had Zbik looking like he wanted to quit. After the round ended, the referee walked up to Zbik and asked him if he was okay. The fight was then halted.

Now I know Sturm fans are working up a later about his performance in this fight, thinking he was great, but I didn’t see it that way. Sturm was good at beating a six round fighter with no power and poor stamina. That’s all you can say. If Sturm has been in with someone like Sergio Martinez or Kelly Pavlik, they would have had to scoop Sturm up off the deck to take him back to his corner. It would have been a massacre. Sturm is good against non-punchers though. I saw this fight as nothing more than another one of Sturm’s many easy defenses against a weak opponent.