Cleverly used the wrong fight strategy against Kovalev

By Boxing News - 08/17/2013 - Comments

By Scott Gilfoid: As I predicted earlier, the huge punching Sergey Kovalev (22-0-1, 20 KO’s) completely obliterated WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (26-1, 12 KO’s) in only 4 rounds in a three-knockdown performance tonight Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.

The loss obviously is a crushing blow for the once promising career of the tall, gangly, rail thin Cleverly. However, he only has himself to blame for getting blown out in 4 rounds. I believe Cleverly used the wrong strategy to fight Kovalev. If you’re in with a knockout artist like Kovalev, you don’t want to try and beat him by throwing a lot of punches.

That’s the worst thing that you can do, because it gave Kovalev a lot of opportunities to land his power shots. Cleverly seemed to think that his strong chin would enable him to take Kovalev’s power shots until he tired of hammering him, but that obviously failed to happen. What Cleverly should have done was run, and run very fast all around the ring. That might have saved him.

If Cleverly had focused his training on using circular movement, maybe he wouldn’t have been crushed in 4 rounds. I mean, I don’t think for a second that Cleverly would have won using that kind of tactic, but at least he wouldn’t have been taken apart by Kovalev.

I think it would have been better for Cleverly to lose by a 12 round decision than by knockout, because at least if the fight had gone to the cards, Cleverly might have gotten lucky with the judges giving him a controversial decision win. The fight was in Cleverly’s hometown, and I wouldn’t have been surprised at all to see a decision given to Cleverly even if he got dominated.

So it’s pretty much academic at this point that Cleverly fought a really dumb fight. Now who gets the blame for this? Was it the trainer who told Cleverly to mix it up with the Russian, or was this a case of Cleverly being hard-headed thinking he could trade with Kovalev and come out ahead.

I don’t know, but whoever the genius was who thought up this terrible fight plan, they need a serious tongue lashing. Heck, I couldn’t come up with a worse fight strategy for Cleverly if I tried.



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