Humberto Soto robbed in loss to Antonio Orozco

By Boxing News - 10/04/2015 - Comments

OrozcoSosa_Hoganphotos(Photo credit: Tom Hogan/Golden Boy Promotions) By Dan Ambrose: In a horrible robbery last Saturday night, former WBC lightweight champion Humberto Soto (65-9-2, 35 KOs) found himself on the receiving end of a good old fashioned controversial 10 round unanimous decision loss to a powerful but very, very limited Antonio Orozco (23-0, 15 KOs) at the StubHub Center in Carson, California.

Soto, 35, did a great job of exposing Orozco in that fight as a limited fighter. Orozco may have won the fight, but he lost the battle, as he was exposed and many of the boxing fans at home and at the Stubhub didn’t agree with the decision the judges handed down.

The judges gave Orozco the win by the scores of 98-91, 97-92 and 97-92. I had Soto winning by a 98-91 score. I couldn’t give Orozco the win because he was outclassed in 9 of the 10 rounds by Soto.

I felt that before the fight, Soto was going to need to do something spectacular to get the win over Orozco, because the young 27-year-old is being pushed hard as a future champion and/or gate keeper type opponent. But it was pretty sad to see how a 35-year-old Soto still had enough in the tank to expose Orozco and do enough to beat him. It doesn’t matter that Soto was robbed by the judges.

Soto still won the fight as far as I’m concerned. The judges only made themselves look bad in the eyes of a lot of boxing fans with their oddball scoring off the fight. It’s never good when the losing fighter is given a win, especially when they get dominated as bad as Orozco did last night.

“I felt comfortable going into this fight,” said Humberto Soto. “I know the kind of fighter Orozco is and was prepared to take on a young tough fighter. I think I dominated the fight, the judges, with all due respect scored this fight wrong. The fight was really on my side.”

Hopefully, Soto will be able to rebound from this loss to get back into position for a world title fight. I think Soto would have matched up better against the unbeaten Viktor Postol than Lucas Matthysse did. They should have switched around the fighters so that the intelligent Soto, with his superb technical skills, could have fought Postol and Matthysse could have fought Orozco.

I think Matthysse-Orozco would have been a barnburner, and I believe that Soto vs. Postol would have been a really excellent with the way that Soto cuts off the ring and goes to the body.

Under the best circumstances, the World Boxing Council won’t drop Soto too far in their rankings after this loss. He was ranked No.7 with the WBC before last night’s fight, so you’ve got to expect that they’ll drop him down to the 11 to 15 spot. Soto doesn’t deserve to be pushed out of the top 15 because he fought well enough to be given the victory.

As for Orozco, I don’t know where this guy goes. I don’t think he can beat Matthysse, Postol, or Ruslan Provodnikov. Orozco would be better off moving down to lightweight because I can’t see him ever beating any of the current champions at 140. Even someone like Lamont Peterson would likely be too good for Orozco unless we got the kind of oddball scores like we saw last night in the Soto vs. Orozco fight.



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