Ward and Hunter had Mayweather winning comfortably over Maidana

By Boxing News - 05/05/2014 - Comments

mayweather521By Chris Williams: Two of boxing’s greatest minds, WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward and trainer Virgil Hunter, both saw the Floyd Mayweather Jr. – Marcos Maidana fight last Saturday night, and they saw absolutely nothing controversial about the judges giving Mayweather Jr. the 12 round decision victory. If anything, they felt that it should have been a unanimous decision instead of a majority decision.

To Ward and Hunter, it was a clear cut 8 rounds to 4 victory for Mayweather in the fight. Like everyone, they saw Maidana throwing a lot of punches, but they also observed that he was missing all night long instead of landing with those punches. You’re not supposed to win rounds based on missed shots, as the name of the game is to score punches that land. Maidana simply wasn’t landing with the punches he was throwing, they felt.

“Probably 8 to 4, give or take,” Ward said to Fighthype.

“It’s one thing to throw them, another thing to land them,” said Hunter. It wasn’t what the fans tried to say it was. Maidana’s a tough, tough guy. You missed a lot of punches. It looked like a Tough Man fight.”

Mayweather won by the scores 116-112, 117-111, and 114-114.

Like Hunter said, Maidana was throwing punches but he wasn’t landing them. The shots were missing constantly and getting picked off of the arms and gloves of Mayweather. Maidana had trouble finding open spots to land his shots, and when he would see a target, he’d frequently miss badly with his punch sailing over the head of Mayweather. Hunter pointed out that if Maidana would have just straightened out his shots, he might have had much success in connecting against Mayweather.

Maidana was too busy throwing looping shots, and he didn’t seem to know where the punches were going to end up. Using those kinds of shots might work against certain fighters, but it wasn’t working against Mayweather, and Maidana did a poor job of adjusting. His trainer Robert Garcia should have told him in between rounds to straight out his punches in order to bring him more success, but he failed to do so.



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