By Chris Williams: While trainer Freddie Roach still insists that his fighter Ruslan Provodnikov (23-3, 16 KO’s) should have been given a decision victory over challenger Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KO’s) last Saturday night at the Barclays Center, the well-respected commentator Paulie Malignaggi, who was working the fight for the UK television company Sky Sports, said that he saw Algieri beating Provodnikov by a comfortable margin by out-boxing and outclassing him in their New York fight.
Malignaggi was impressed with how Algieri, the weaker puncher, was able to school Provodnikov after the 1st round and pretty much dominate him in the last 11 rounds of the fight.
“I had it eight rounds to four for Algieri,” said Malignaggi via RingTV.com. “There was nothing going on for Provodnikov after Round 1. The guy’s not making adjustments. There was not one adjustment made by Provodnikov after Round 1. I mean, there was not one adjustment, and that’s pretty simple. He spent the whole night trying to land the same big shot and that same big punch that he landed in Round 1, and that didn’t happen for him. It just didn’t happen.”
You have to blame Roach for not trying to get Provodnikov to shift gears into another battle plan, because a good trainer like Virgil Hunter would have had Provodnikov armed with at least 4-5 good plans that he could shift from if one of the plans weren’t working out. It looked like both Roach and Provodnikov felt that if they stuck with plan-A that eventually Algieri would succumb to one of Provodnikov’s big power shots. In other words, they assumed that because Provodnikov was able to land a big shot in the 1st round that knocked Algieri to the canvas and closed his right eye then they were going to continue looking for that one big shot instead of implementing another plan.
One gets the sense that Malignaggi would have been a great trainer for Provodnikov if he had been in his corner last Saturday night to give him instructions in how to chop Algieri down, because he seemed to know his style really well and would work against it. But Roach seemed to be clueless in what to come up with for his fighter to get back into the fight.
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