Hatton thought he was ahead by 4 rounds against Senchenko when he was stopped

By Boxing News - 11/25/2012 - Comments

Image: Hatton thought he was ahead by 4 rounds against Senchenko when he was stoppedBy Scott Gilfoid: One interesting part about last Saturday’s 9th round knockout loss for Ricky Hatton (45-3, 32 KO’s) against Vyacheslav Senchenko (33-1, 22 KO’s) in Manchester was that Hatton thought he was ahead by a whopping four rounds at the time he was stopped by a body shot in the 9th.

I don’t know how Hatton could have thought he was ahead by so many rounds because that would mean that Senchenko had won only 2 rounds, and I don’t see how Hatton could have thought that when he was taking punishment from the 6th round. Those rounds weren’t even close in my opinion because Hatton was walking into shot after shot. And in the first five rounds, you got to give Senchenko at least one of those rounds.

There’s no way Hatton won the first five rounds of the fight unless you’re ignoring everything that Senchenko did in those rounds by landing the harder and the cleaner shots. In truth, I think the fight was knotted up going into the 9th round rather than Hatton being ahead by four rounds like he thought he was.

The bad part about Hatton being so off with his perception of how he was doing in the fight last night is that if he had a clearer picture of how he was doing, or in this case or how badly he was doing, he might have been able to make some adjustments by shifting into a Plan B or Plan C to try some other things out. What Hatton was doing wasn’t working with him plodding forward like he always had and throwing wild haymaker shots.

It was real primitive stuff devoid of the kind of technique that he needed in order to win. Heck, Hatton had the blueprint in how to beat Senchenko from the feather fisted Paulie Malignaggi, who showed that if you stand on the outside and jab Senchenko repeatedly his eyes well swell and you get a stoppage. Senchenko’s left eye did swell and cut in the 7th, but Hatton wasn’t even throwing jabs to target it and that was his mistake.

If I was working as Hatton’s trainer I told it to him straight that the fight was basically knotted up and that he was starting to lose round after round. I had him change up his game. Of course, I would have instructed Hatton to focus on his jab from round one because I wouldn’t have been under the perfection that a 34-year-old fighter coming off of 3 1/2 years of retirement and having lost 70 pounds to make the weight could fight with high intensity for 10 full rounds. I would have been looking for ways that the aging Hatton could conserve his energy and one of those ways would have been for him to throw jabs 90% of the time. He didn’t do this and instead he fought with the same fighting style he used in his youth without accommodating his older body. That wasn’t smart and neither was taking the fight without a couple of 6 to 8 round tune-up bouts.



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