Marquez easily beats Alvarado; Postol dominates Aydin

By Boxing News - 05/17/2014 - Comments

marquez7aBy Jim Dower: In a mostly one-sided fight, 40-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez (56-7-1, 40 KO’s) easily defeated Mike Alvarado (34-3, 23 KO’s) in beating him by a 12 round unanimous decision on Saturday night in a WBO welterweight eliminator bout at the Forum, in Inglewood, California, USA. The final judges scored were 117-109, 117-109 and 119-109. Marquez dropped Alvarado in the 8th. In the 9th, Alvarado returned the favor by knocking Marquez down in the 9th.

The fight was one-sided throughout as Alvarado was unable to land his single power shots due to the head and body movement of Marquez. Alvarado needed to throw combinations, but he spent most of the fight just throwing one punch at a time. Even with his jabs, Alvarado was throwing one jab instead of doubling it up.

In the 8th, Marquez nailed Alvarado with a huge right hand that put him down on the canvas badly hurt. Alvarado got up by the count of 7, and he was able to make it out of the round due to the bell sounding moments later. Had the knockdown occurred earlier in the round, Marquez would have likely knocked Alvarado out.

Alvarado dropped Marquez with a big right hand in the 9th round. But instead of going after Marquez, Alvarado treated him like he was afraid of getting countered and he let Marquez get out of the round.

In rounds 10 through 12, Alvarado failed to press the action the way he needed to despite the fact that he was trailing badly in the fight. At times, Alvarado moved around the ring as if he was trying to box Marquez instead of someone who needed to go for a knockout. It was strange because Alvarado fought like he had no sense of what he needed to do.

After the fight Marquez said “It was a big challenge. Age doesn’t matter as long as you take care of yourself.”

When asked if he would fight Manny Pacquiao next, Marquez said “I’m going to go home and talk to my family about it. I’m not thinking about a 5th fight right now. I’m going to go home and think.”

Alvarado didn’t have an answer for why he spent most of the fight trying to box Marquez instead of using his youth, size, and strength to try and overpower him. If this was Alvarado’s trainer’s idea for him to box Marquez then he needs to get a new trainer, because that was a really bad plan.

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#1 WBC light welterweight contender Viktor Postol (26-0, 11 KO’s) gave #2 WBC Selcuk Aydin (26-3, 19 KO’s) a terrible beating in stopping him in the 11th round. Postol connected with a flurry of hard shots that ended with a vicious right uppercut that dropped Aydin on his back in the 11th round. Referee Raul Caiz Jr. then stepped in and halted the fight immediately at 2:52 of the round.

Aydin was badly hurt from the shots that dropped him and there was no way that he was going to get back up from the knockdown. Aydin’s left leg folded underneath him when he as knocked down, and hopefully he didn’t injure it during the fall.

The fight was incredibly one-sided, and you can make a case for the fight needing to be stopped by the 8th round or even earlier because Aydin, 5’7″, was too short to connect with his shots against the 5’11” Postol. Aydin was just taking one-way punishment in every round and only rarely throwing a punch back at him. You could tell from watching Aydin that he wasn’t mentally into the fight after the 6th. He was throwing punches as consistently as he was earlier in the fight, and he was getting nailed way too much.

The crowd hated the fight and were booing constantly from the the 6th round. It’s not that there wasn’t a lot of punches being thrown. The problem was it was all one-sided with Postol beating Aydin like a he was a punching bag.

You’ve got to blame this mismatch on the World Boxing Council because they’re the ones that made the decision to rank Aydin at No.2 in their rankings. Just looking at Aydin fight in some of his previous bouts, he didn’t look like a fighter that should be ranked anywhere close to the top 15. Aydin looked like a 2nd tier fighter who had no business being ranked #2 by the WBC. When you see mismatches like the one we saw tonight, it’s usually a case where the sanctioning body makes a mistake in ranking a fighter too high.

Postol doesn’t have much of a chance to get a title shot against WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia, because he plans on vacating his WBC title and moving up to the welterweight division to get a fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. Postol will likely wind up facing #3 Lucas Matthysse for the vacant WBC 140 lb title once Garcia vacates. That’ll be a much different fight than what we saw tonight, because Matthysse throws punches and will be testing Postol’s chin in a major way.



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