(Martin Murray seen here getting worked over by Gennady Golovkin) By Scott Gilfoid: Former world title challenger Martin Murray is predicting that Kell Brook (36-0, 25 KOs) won’t last long against IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (35-0, 32 KOs) in their fight on September 10 at the O2 Arena in London, England. Murray (33-4, 16 KOs) was knocked out by Golovkin in 11 rounds last year in January 2015 after running all around the ring the entire fight to keep from getting stopped.
It was a pure survival oriented fight for Murray after the first two rounds. You could see the 33-year-olld Murray make the conscience decision by the third round to just try and survive rather than win the fight. It then got really ugly with Murray spending two rounds trying to clinch Golovkin nonstop the way Brook did against Shawn Porter in 2014.
In this case, Golovkin wasn’t having any of the holding business from Murray, so he would step back and nail him with shots each time he would come forward to put him in a bear hug to stall out the fight. Goodness knows, the referee wasn’t doing anything to control Murray’s clinching, so Golovkin took matters into his own fans by nailing Murray with hard shots each time he tried to clinch him.
Golovkin eventually taught Murray that he needed to think up another spoiling tactic if he wanted to try and stall out the fight, because clinching wasn’t going to work against him. That’s when Murray went into his Plan-B strategy for survival by running. It was so awful to look at.
“I don’t think Kell can go as long as I did with him. I think it goes five rounds, six maximum, and I know what it is like in there with him. It could go early,” said Murray to espn.com. “It’s a step too far for Kell,. Golovkin is another level and he’s in deep, deep water and I don’t think he’s going to be able to swim.”
Oh yeah, of course Brook isn’t going to be able to swim with Golovkin in this fight. It’s academic that Brook is going to be over his head in this fight. It’s going to be one of those historic massacres that we’ve seen in the past with Brook getting totally routed by Golovkin, and there’s nothing he can do about it. The only thing that Brook can really do is tell his trainer Dominic Ingle before the fight to have the white towel ready to toss into the ring when the beating gets too bad.
Ingle can toss the towel into the ring to get the referee to stop the contest before Brook takes too much punishment. The idea here is that by stopping the fight early, it will save Brook for another day. You don’t want to see Brook get used up completely in a fight he can’t win and then having the rest of his career negatively impacted.
Brook will probably try and melt down to 147 to defend his IBF welterweight title against his IBF mandatory challenger Errol Spence after this fight. It won’t be good for Brook if he comes into the Spence fight half stunned from the beating he took from Golovkin. I’m just saying.
“Kell has got great range, distance and timing so Golovkin is going to be in with something different himself,” said Murray. “But Golovkin’s distance and timing are something else. He’s in a different league to anything I’ve fought and Canelo [Saul Alvarez] won’t touch him.”
Let’s be serious here. It doesn’t matter how good Brook’s range is in this fight, because Golovkin is going to track him down, nail him with body shots, and take his wheels away in that order. Brook likes to move around the ring when he’s facing weak guys with inflated rankings like Kevin Bizier and Frankie Gavin.
Brook was able to do that with those guys because he wasn’t hit with body shots. Golovkin is going to be nailing Brook with huge punches to the body from round one that will take the air out of his tires completely, leaving him immobile and helpless. Brook will be literally forced to be stationary against Golovkin whether he wants to or not. Once his legs are taken away from the body shots, Brook will be like a bird with clipped wings. He won’t be able to move and will be forced to fight Golovkin in a ‘last stand’ type of fight.
You never like to see guys forced into a last stand against big punchers, because they’re not made for that kind of a fight. Brook has never had to fight a body puncher before during his career because his opponents have been so carefully picked out by his management.
If you scour Brook’s resume, you see weak opposition as far as the eye can see. The only name that stands out among the rabble that Brook has fought is Shawn Porter, and he didn’t even beat him. Brook clinched him for 12 rounds and got the benefit of some very generous scoring. I saw the fight and had Porter winning 10 rounds to 2. I couldn’t give rounds to Brook with him holding 10+ times per round. I mentally was taking points off from Brook for each round he held excessively, which is why I had Porter winning easily.
I thought Brook should have been disqualified for using the old punch and grab technique. Heck, it wasn’t even the ‘punch and grab’ strategy that Brook was employing in that fight. It was just straight up grabbing. I still don’t know why the referee that worked that fight didn’t take off at least four points for Brook’s holding. Of course, once it gets past two deductions for holding, the referees tend to just flat out disqualify, which is what I think the referee should have done for the Porter-Brook fight.
Murray tried to hold and he tried to run, but neither of those things worked against Golovkin. I’m sure that those two gimmicks will be Brook’s Plan-A and Plan-B respectively. If running and holding doesn’t work, then I suspect that Plan-C will be Brook standing and slugging in a last stand effort to try and beat Golovkin at his own game.
I think Brook realizes that this will be a fail if it gets to that point, but I think he’ll try it for a while. If it looks like Brook is getting the worst of it, I see him looking over to his trainer Ingle and giving him the signal to toss into the ring the white towel of surrender so that he can escape the punishment. I wish I could say that Brook will be willing to go down with the ship like a good captain to go out on his shield, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.
I see this as fight that Brook will look to get out of at the first sign of things starting to go wrong for him against GGG. Once it starts looking bleak for Brook in the 1st or 2nd rounds, I think he’ll quickly rifle through his different game plans within a wink of an eye, and then the signal will likely be given to Ingle to toss the white towel of surrender into the ring. Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of angry faces at the O2 Arena on the night, but the guy that will probably get the brunt of the criticism will be the trainer for tossing the towel into the ring to save Brook from taking a needless beating.
“Golovkin really hurt me with the body shots he took me down with. I gritted my teeth and got back up but when those body shots hit you, you don’t recover,” said Murray.
Golovkin knocked Murray down twice in the fourth round and once in the 10th. It looked to me like Golovkin backed off after dropping Murray with body shots in the 4th and let him survive to give the boxing fans an entertaining fight. I think Golovkin wanted to toy with Murray the way that a cat toys with a rat before he eventually gets tired of it.
I had the feeling that Golovkin could have stopped Murray in the 5th or earlier if he had wanted to. Golovkin let Murray run around the ring until the 11th, when he finally put him out of his misery after trapping him against the ropes. In rounds five through ten, Golovkin had a gleeful look on his face like he was really enjoying himself in toying with Murray by torturing him slowly rather than just getting it over with.
I don’t think Golovkin is going to be in the playing around mood on September 10, because Brook has been yapping too much in the buildup to this fight, and I think the Kazakhstan fighter isn’t going to be filling in the generous mood to just leave him out there to run around the ring or to hold excessively like he did against Porter. The crowd is going to be screaming their heads off in support of Brook, and this is going to make Golovkin want to shut them up by obliterating their hero in lightning fashion.