By Erik Schmidt: WIBF Women’s International Boxing Federation lightweight champion Ramona Kuehne (12-0, 3 KOs) defeated Dahianna Santana (14-5, 5 KOs) by a 10-round unanimous decision on Friday night at the Maritim Hotel, Magdeburg, in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. The final judges’ scores were 97-93, 100-92 and 97-93. Kuehne, 28, had little problems with Santana, from the Dominican Republic, winning most of the rounds except for a couple.
Both fighters often missed badly with their shots, in particular Santana, who looked to be swinging for the fences with every punch that she threw during the 10-round bout. Kuehne, however, was the much more accurate puncher and in the second half of the fight, she began to nail Santana with a lot of hard right hands to the head.
In the first round, Santana came out fast, throwing hard shots and missing repeatedly with wild swings and not coming close to landing. Kuehne wasn’t doing much either other than throwing an occasional jab and looking really timid. In the last minute of the round, Santana started getting a lot more accurate with her punches and was able to land a handful or left hands to the head.
Santana continued missing a lot of punches in the 2nd round, except in this round Kuehne finally started letting her hands go a lot more, hitting Santana with hard right hands and jabs to the head. The round was still very ugly, because both fighters were missing badly more often than not with their punches and looking like unskilled amateur rather than professional boxers.
In rounds three through five, Kuehne dominated the action, mostly using her excellent jab with a few hard right hands added in on occasion. Santana wasted a lot of time circling the ring, for no apparent reason that I can think of, because she had nothing to fear from the light-hitting Kuehne and seemed to have her strategy backwards.
Indeed, it should have been her, the harder puncher of the two, that should have been attacking rather than circling the ring and fighting on the outside rather than visa-versa. In the 6th round, Santana finally seemed to get her head together and came out firing big shots from the start of the round. Because of that, she did very well in the round and had Kuehne on the run, fighting on her back foot and looking scared.
In the 7th round, Kuehne fought back hard, landing a huge left hook to the head early in the round and using her jab to dominate Santana and keep her from getting off her punches like she had done a round earlier.
In the 8th, Santana once again came out strong, firing left hands and landing well with combinations to the head. However, Kuehne came on in the last minute to steal the round, throwing nice left hands while Santana continued to miss with wild shots.
In the 9th and 10th rounds, Kuehne used her hard jab to nail Santana over and over as she would come forward trying to land her big looping shots. Santana was pretty much limited to only jabs in the 10th, and needed much more than that at the time, needing a knockout to win, because she was trailing in the fight by a significant margin.