By Jim Dower: Arthur Abraham (37-4, 28 KO’s) earned a 12 round unanimous decision over the better than expected Willbeforce Shihepo (20-7, 15 KO’s) to win the vacant WBO Inter-Continental super middleweight title on Saturday night at the Sport and Congress Center, Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.

The decision was booed by the German crowd, and that’s a pretty good sign that they felt that Abraham got a questionable decision.

The win puts the 33-year-old Abraham in position to get another crack at WBO super middleweight champion Robert Stieglitz, who stopped Abraham in the 4th round last March.

Abraham really struggled tonight against the faster and much busier Shihepo. This was one of those fights where the judges had to be focusing more on power rather than quantity, as Abraham was outworked in every round of the fight by a really wide margin. The judges scored it 116-113, 116-112, 117-111. However, you could just as easily have given those same scores to Shihepo, and you’d get no arguments.

Abraham was hit constantly by Shihepo in rounds one through five. Like in his recent loss to Stieglitz, Abraham spent the overwhelming amount of time just covering up and trying not to get hit instead of coming forward, and punching with Shihepo. Had Abraham thrown his shots at the same time as Shihepe, he’d have won most of the exchanged and likely knocked him out due to Abraham’s superior power.

In rounds 10-12, Abraham looked like he faced a bit, as he didn’t let his hands go enough and just gave the rounds away.

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Big Bulgarian heavyweight Kubrat Pulev (18-0, 9 KO’s) put himself in position for a payday bout against IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko with a 12 round unanimous decision win over Tony Thompson (38-4, 26 KO’s). Pulev came on after the fourth round to wear Thompson with his jabs, and power shots. The judges scored it 116-112, 118-110, 117-111.

Thompson didn’t look like he was well trained for the fight, because he controlled the action in the first 4 rounds, but after the 4th, he looked too tired to throw punches. It wasn’t so much what Pulev was doing, because he wasn’t doing much other than throwing jabs and power shots. But the problem for Thompson seemed to be entirely with his conditioning or lack thereof. He wasn’t trained well enough to fight hard to beat Pulev. I think a 36-year-old version of Thompson would have easily won, but not the 41-year-old Thompson that we saw in the ring with Pulev.

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EBU light heavyweight champion Juergen Braehmer (41-2, 31 KO’s) put himself in position to get a title shot against WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev by defeating Stefan Abatangelo (17-3-1, 6 KO’s) by a 12 round unanimous decision. The final judges scores were 119-109, 119-109 and 115-111. Braehmer was able to bounce around the ring and out-box the much shorter Abatangelo with easy. Braehmer suffered a cut over his right eye in the 10th. Other than that, the fight was uneventful.

Other boxing results:

Tyron Zeuge UD 8 Nathan King
Enrico Koelling TKO 3 Haris Causevic
Dustin Dirks Draw 8 Tomas Adamek