By Francisco Chantengo: To no one’s surprise, undefeated WBA super featherweight champion Edwin Valero (24-0, 24 KOs) stopped his 36 year-old Takehiro Shimada (22-4-1, 15 KOs) in the 7th round of a scheduled 12-round title bout on Wednesday night at the Nihon Budokan, in Tokyo, Japan. The bout, a horrible mismatch going in, was never remotely competitive as Valero, 26, treated the Japanese Shimada as punching bag for most of the fight, hitting him with wild looping shots over and over. In the 7th round, Valero missed a wild left hand, but then followed it with a hard right hook that caught Shimada dead on the chin, sending him down to the canvas where he crouched, looking as if he were taking a knee while holding onto the top rope with his left hand.
With his right hand he held it in front of his face, as if to indicate that he was surrendering. Valero, however, stood over him for a second, then reached out and clobbered him with a big right hand that sent the crouching Shimada on his back on the canvas, although incredibly he still never let go of the top rope. Shimada then made it to his feet, looking hurt, his left eye puffed up and swollen, and him looking out of it. The referee Guillermo Perez Pineda then promptly stopped the fight at 1:55 of the seventh round.
Valero did pretty much anything he wanted to in rounds one through four, stalking Shimada constantly and hitting him with combinations. Valero didn’t show much in the way of technique, as he just seemed to wade in and throw big looping shots, putting everything he had into virtually all of them. Shimada looked totally defensive, like he was just trying to survive. He rarely threw any punches to speak of, instead mostly moving around the ring, covering up and clinching Valero constantly to prevent him from getting off his punches.
Valero threw a lot of jabs to the midsection of Shimada and worked the body with hooks frequently, trying to slow down Shimada’s constant movement. In each round, Shimada found huge holes in Valero’s leaky defense, and would nail him with big right hands at every opportunity. I’m not sure what Shimada was like in his prime, around five years ago, but his punch output was bad to say the least.
In the 5th and 6th rounds, Valero began to land a high number of huge shots, as he pummeled the tiring Shimada, who could no longer run and clinch as effectively as he did in the earlier rounds. At the same time, Shimada’s offense, dreadful from the beginning, was almost nonexistent in these rounds. This allowed Valero virtual freedom to wade in with his typical sloppy attacks, and throw leather with great abandon. He still didn’t look anything close to being a knockout artist, but due to the fact that he able to throw nonstop punches against what was, in effect, a human punching bag, it was apparent that a knockout would be coming in a round or two if he kept up this pace.
Both rounds were horribly one-sided, as was the entire fight, and an argument could be made that the fight should have been stopped in either the 5th or 6th, given the lack of offense from Shimada. However, the fight was in Japan, and they weren’t about to let it be stopped and have Shimada look bad in front of his home crowd. As it turns out, we wouldn’t have to wait long for Valero to score a legitimate knockout. In the 7th round, after blasting away at the hapless Shimada for two-thirds of the round, Valero suddenly hit him with a big jab that sent Shimada bouncing off the ropes like a ball.
I knew then than the end was near. Shortly after that, Valero threw one of his typically wild shots, this one a left, and promptly missed by a mile, but he then followed it with a short right hook that connected with a thud and sent Shimada down towards the canvas.
Well, sort of down, because he never went entirely down, instead crouching on his haunches and holding onto the top rope with his right hand. Valero, however, studied the situation carefully as if lining up a putt, and then swung away with his right hand and toppled Shimada over on his backside, right hand still holding onto the top rope as if his life depended on it. He got up, but the referee took one look at Shimada’s face, all swollen and battered, and immediately stopped the fight.
Just watching how bad Shimada looked in the first round, I found it almost unbelievable that he was ranked #7 in the WBC super featherweight division, because he was just plain awful. The guy may have been able to fight years ago, but he sure couldn’t now, not against Valero. I checked Shimada’s record and noted that he hadn’t fought a decent fighter since 2004, with all of the remaining fighters having badly mediocre records like 6-6 and 0-3.
I was frankly stunned that a fighter could be ranked so highly without having fought at least a C-class fighter. In this case, Shimada had been fighting exclusively D-level fighters for four years, and yet he was given a title shot against Valero. I don’t know about you, but that seems so wrong. I know Valero wants to keep his knockout record – 23 KOs in 23 fights – going, which thanks to the less than stellar ability of Shimda, it was increased by one. However, it’s less than impressive considering how poor a fighter Shimada was. I don’t know about you, but to me there should be an asterisk next to this KO win in Valero’s record, because this fight was a laughable.
Shimada rarely threw any punches for the entire fight, averaging around four to five per round, yet every time he’d throw something, he’d catch Valero cleanly in the head. This brings up another thing, namely Valero’s so-called power. From what I saw of him, he’s not that hard of a puncher. Sure, he hits hard, but not any harder than many of the top super featherweights. As a matter of fact, Shimada looked to be a harder puncher than Valero, though you wouldn’t know it because he was only throwing around five measly punches per round.
After watching a couple of rounds, I realized that Valero’s power is completely overrated, that the only reason he’s been getting all the knockouts is because he still hasn’t fought any real tough fighters at this point, even though this was his 4th title defense. Thankfully, that will all change in the near future, because good super featherweights like Urbano Antillon and Yuriokis Gamboa are quickly moving up the rankings in the division. I’d pick either of them to easily knockout Valero in few rounds.