By Nate Anderson: In a decision that seemed way out of whack, Italian cruiserweight contender Giacobbe Fragomeni (26-1, 10 KOs) defeated Rudolf Kraj (14-1, 10 KOs) by an 8th round technical decision after Fragomeni, 39, received a nasty cut over his left eye from an unintentional head butt in the 7th round, leading to the fight being stopped by the ringside doctor in the 8th. The fight outcome then went to the judges’ scorecards, all which saw Fragomeni winning by the scores of 77-74, 77-74 and 77-74. However, it appeared to me that Kraj had easily won the fight by at least a five rounds to three score, if not more than that.
Fragomeni, fighting in front of his home audience in PalaLido, in Milan, Lombardia, Italy, did little punching in most of the rounds, just following the much taller Kraj around and getting hit. I’m not sure if it was because of Fragomeni’s advanced age or just a case of him having an off night, but whatever the case, he was getting out-punched by at least a three to one margin from what I saw, and rarely throwing anything back. When he would attempt a punch, even the ones that missed, the Italian crowd would go crazy, applauding like mad as if he had just scored a knockout or something rather than just one punch.
At one time, in his fight with David Haye two years ago in 2006, Fragomeni looked pretty good, showing an ability to throw combinations. And even though Haye eventually knocked him out in the 9th round, Fragomeni didn’t look half bad in the fight, as he gave Haye all kinds of trouble on that night. Well, that wasn’t the case on Saturday against Kraj. Fragomeni looked positively awful, appearing to lose the first three rounds due to his anemically low punch output. The fourth round was pretty much the same, with Fragomeni landing hardly anything, but he did at least try hard to land punches in the round, so I gave it to him out of mercy more than anything.
The crowd was screaming, and I knew that probably meant that the judges’ would give him the round. However, he was missing most of his punches in the round. Maybe it’s because of his short 5’9″ height, which made it hard for him to land his punches against the 6’2″ Kraj, who looked like a towering giant next to him. Certainly, Fragomeni’s punches weren’t any harder than Kraj’s, because he looked like the much weaker fighter.
However, he wasn’t. I gave Fragomeni another mercy round in the 6th, again because of the crowd noise and because he looked really bad, but he was trying really hard. The younger, 30-year-old Kraj was doing a number on him, though, hitting him often with big shots and leaning away out of the range of Fragomeni’s shorter arms. In a lot of ways, Kraj reminded me of a smaller version of Andrew Golota, except with more speed and a better variety of punches.
I was really impressed with his boxing ability and overall skills. It’s too bad that he had to travel to Italy, and end up losing like this. In reality I saw Kraj as winning the 6th, 7th and 8th rounds. He was doing the better work, landing the cleaner punches and making Fragomeni miss a lot of the time. In the 7th round, Fragomeni was cut over his left eye after a clash of heads with Kraj. The ringside doctor examined the cut and allowed the fight to continue, but it seemed almost dead certain that the fight would be stopped soon because the cut was bleeding like a stuck pig.
In the 8th round, Kraj continued his dominating of Fragomeni until the fight was stopped by the ringside doctor. With this win, Fragomeni captures the vacant WBC cruiserweight title. One would hope that Kraj would be allowed a rematch with him at some point in the near future, because with the scoring of the fight and the cut ending it way before hand, it seems that outcome was far from conclusive.
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