By Erik Schmidt: Previously unbeaten super featherweight Vitali Tajbert (17-1, 6 KOs) undefeated string finally ran out against EBU (European) super featherweight Sergey Gulyakevich (26-1, 12 KOs) on Friday night, when Tajbert was defeated by a 12-round unanimous decision at the Sporthalle Brandberge, Halle an der Saale, in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. The final judges’ scores were 117-112, 117-112 and 115-113. Having to deal with a four and half inch height disadvantage, the 5’5 1/2″ Tajbert found the going tough against the long armed 5’10” Gulyakevich, who often bombed him at a distance and was able to stay away from many of Tajbert’s big shots.
However, in the second half of the fight, Gulyakevich, 27, used a combination of infighting and fighting from the distance to beat back a fierce rally from Tajbert. In the end, however, Gulyakevich had too high a work rate for Tajbert to match and he was unable to keep up with him, despite Tajbert’s huge crowd advantage.
Having used to getting things his own way against mostly over-matched opposition in Germany, Tajbert suddenly found himself struggling in the first round against Gulyakevich as he was hit often with a mix long jabs and right hands. Unable to close to distance on Gulyakevich without eating a massive amount of punches, Tajbert seemed content to stay on the outside where he was unable to get in his own punches and was forced to eat jabs.
Nothing much changed in the 2nd and 3rd rounds for Tajbert. If anything, things got worse for him with Gulyakevich now throwing a wider variety of punches and keeping Tajbert under a constant blanket of heavy fire.
No longer willing to wait for Gulyakevich to slow down, Tajbert began pressing forward and attacking Gulyakevich hard. However, more often than not, he would come up empty-handed and would get hit several times as Gulyakevich would flurry and retreat quickly to the outside.
Tajbert did land several nice right hands, but it was not nearly enough to make up for all the shots that he was getting hit with from Gulyakevich. To listen to the crowd, who badly favored Tajbert, one would falsely assume that he was winning the fight because they screamed like mad every time he would throw a punch.
However, there was no way he was winning the fight because Gulyakevich was hitting him at will with shots from every angle. What was more telling, though, was the sustained periods of silence from the crowd, which showed that there were few moments in which Tajbert was landing anything significant.
In rounds four through six, Gulyakevich continued his domination of Tajbert, now landing a lot of right hands. Gulyakevich’s right eye began to swell underneath in the 4th and he was starting to slow down somewhat, but it didn’t matter, because Tajbert was still landing only rarely and not doing enough to win any of the rounds.
Tajbert landed a couple of good right hands in the 6th, but that was about all he could do. In between his rare shots, he was getting hit an awful lot. In rounds seven though ten, Gulyakevich continued his mastery over Tajbert, beating him more or less as easy as he had in the earlier rounds of the fight.
Tajbert, from Kazakhstan and now fighting out of Germany, still only was able to land two to three good punches in the round – not nearly enough to win any of the rounds. To make things worse, Tajbert’s left eye was cut in the 10th and it bled continuously for the remainder of the fight. By then, however, he needed a knockout to win and the cut wasn’t going to change that.
Now fighting desperately, Tajbert fought hard in the 11th and 12th rounds, and hurt Gulyakevich with a number of hard right hands to the head. Unfortunately for Tajbert, he was unable to finish him off and ended up losing the fight.
In the undercard, unbeaten heavyweight Sebastian Koeber (17-0, 12 KOs) came on strong in the 10th round and stopped Dieter Roth (19-1, 12 KOs) with several hard right hand uppercuts, dropping him to the canvas. Roth, 25, staggered to his feet, his nose bleeding, and the fight was promptly stopped by the referee at 2:59 of the round. The win gave Koeber, 29, the interim German BDB heavyweight title. Both fighters slugged it out from the first round on, landing huge bombs and showing few concerns about using defense.