By Nate Anderson: EBU (European) super bantamweight champion Rendall Munroe (17-1, 8 KOs) stopped Italian challenger Fabrizio Trotta (13-5-2, 4 KOs) in the 5th round of a scheduled 12-round bout on Thursday night at the Dublin City University, in Dublin, Ireland. The fight was stopped in the 5th after Trotta injured his hand after connecting with a right uppercut to the head of Munroe. At the time of the stoppage, Munroe was punishing Trotta with powerful body shots and wearing him down.
“I think I was too strong for him, really,” Munroe said. “I think he was just looking for an excuse to get out. After the round, he [Trotta] was shaking his head like didn’t know what to do.”
Surprisingly, Trotta did really well in the 1st round, finding it easy to land punches through Munroe’s wide open defense. For most of the round, Munroe, 28, dominated the action with combinations to the head. However, in the last minute, Trotta pressed forward taking the fight to Munroe and flailing on him with power shots for the final sixty seconds of the round.
It seemed as if Trotta was fighting in top gear, with his foot to the floor, trying to give it his all in the opening round, knowing that he would probably not last for long. In the 2nd round, Munroe began to take charge of the fight, landing powerful hooks to Trotta’s midsection over and over again. Though both fighters weighed in at the same 121 pounds, Munroe looked considerably bigger than Trotta, looking as big as a lightweight (135 lbs) rather than a super bantamweight fighter.
The extra size really showed itself on the power shots that Munroe was throwing, because he was landing very hard to the body, and Trotta looked uncomfortable with the shots he was taking. In the 3rd round, Munroe fierce body attack was beginning to pay off, as Trotta’s punch output dropped off dramatically, while at the same time he was beginning to look fatigued from the constant rain of shots.
For the most part, Trotta pretty much threw no punches in the round and spent the majority of the time taking punishment from Munroe. At the end of the round, a frustrated looking Trotta shoved Munroe in the back as he was turning around to walk back to his corner.
In the 4th round, Munroe continued attacking Trotta to the body, backing him up and blasting him over and over. Like in the previous round, Trotta was offering nothing back in the way of offense, and was only out there absorbing shots.
In the 5th round, Munroe continued his body attack, working his shots in from one of his body to the other and hurting him. Finally, after taking a lot of hard body shots in the round, Trotta threw a right uppercut to the head of Munroe, and immediately backed away holding his right hand, grimacing in pain. After the referee Erkki Meronen examined Trotta’s right hand, the fight was quickly stopped at 1:27 of the round, because it was determined that he was too injured to keep on fighting.