By Scott Gilfoid: In a totally one-sided fight, #4 WBO Tyson Fury (23-0, 17 KOs) stopped #1 WBO Dereck Chisora (20-5, 13 KOs) in a 10th round stoppage on Saturday night in their WBO heavyweight eliminator bout at the ExCel Arena in London, UK.
The fight was halted by Chisora’s corner after the 10th round due to the one-sided nature of the fight. Chisora was bleeding under his right eye and from his nose. The fight was horribly one-sided, and even more one-sided than their first fight in 2011. Chisora was just too slow, too weak and too limited to give Fury any kind of fight.
The crowd hated the one-sided nature of the fight, as they booed continuously from the 6th round on.
To show you how easy the fight was for Fury, he spent much of it fighting in the southpaw stance and toying with Chisora by flicking jabs. The jabs were backhanded jabs rather than normal jabs, and Fury was eventually warned about this from the referee. This didn’t help Chisora any though, because when he did eventually start throwing his jabs correctly, he started swelling up Chisora’s face.
Chisora looked weight drained from the start of the fight. I mean, he came into the fight looking incredibly toned, but his power and conditioning was nowhere. He would have been better off coming in flabby like he normally does, because at least he would have had more power.
With this victory, Fury is now the WBO mandatory challenger to champion Wladimir Klitschko. However, Fury is still going to likely have to wait a while before he gets a shot against Wladimir, because the Ukrainian will probably be looking to fight the winner of the January fight between WBC champion Bermane Stiverne and Deontay Wilder rather than wasting his time facing the feather-fisted Fury in a title defense of his WBO belt. Facing Stiverne or Wilder are much bigger fights for Wladimir than him defending his belt against the light hitting Fury.
This was a crushing defeat for Chisora, because it was the 5th time that he’d faced a decent heavyweight during his career and it was yet another loss for Chisora. The defeat pretty much shows that Chisora is more of a journeyman level guy than an actual contender. The World Boxing Organization may have had Chisora ranked highly by their organization, but it was painfully obvious from the 1st round that Chisora is more of a journeyman level fighter than an actual contender. He’s failed every time he’s stepped it up during his career, and I suspect that he’ll continue to fail when he eventually steps it up again. Chisora would be a good opponent for Anthony Joshua or David Price at this point in his career. They could sharpen their claws on him and get a reasonably good scalp to add to their resumes.
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In somewhat controversial decision, European middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders (21-0, 11 KOs) came out on top in beating Chris Eubank Jr (18-1, 13 KOs) by a 12 round split decision. The final judges’ scores were 115-114 and 115-113 for Saunders, and 116-113 for Eubank Jr.
Eubank Jr appeared to take over the fight from the 6th round, as he was the more active fighter and he landed the cleaner shots. Saunders mostly clinched and leaned on Eubank Jr for the last 7 rounds, and the referee let Saunders get away with the holding without taking points off. With all the holding that Saunders did in the last 7 rounds, I couldn’t give him any of the rounds because he was purely negative and just looking to survive rather than win rounds.
Eubank Jr said after the fight “I’m ready for a rematch. It was close. I felt like I won most of the 2nd half of the fight. Hopefully, we can do a rematch asap.”
Saunders said he was open to giving Eubank Jr a rematch as long as Saunders can beat the winner of the Matt Korobov vs. Andy Lee fight.
Overall, I wasn’t surprised that Eubank Jr didn’t get the nod with the judges, because I felt that he pretty much needed a knockout to ensure that he got the win. I didn’t see Eubank Jr as having any chance at all of winning a decision against the arguably more popular Saunders, and it turns out I was right. I wasn’t impressed at all with Saunders. The guy just holds and leans, and doesn’t throw enough punches. If you put him in with a good middleweight like Gennady Golovkin or Miguel Cotto, he’ll get blown apart unless he’s holding all night long to keep them from getting their shots off.
Boxing results on the card:
Tyson Fury TKO 10 Dereck Chisora
Billy Joe Saunders SD 12 Chris Eubank Jr
Frankie Gavin W 12 Bradley Skeete
Mitchell Smith W 10 Zoltan Kovacs
Frank Buglioni UD 10 Andrew Robinson
Lewis Pettitt UD 12 Santiago Allione
Liam Walsh UD 12 Gary Sykes
Eddie Chambers W TKO 3 Dorian Darch
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